Robert Fay’s essays, book reviews and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Millions, The Quarterly Conversation, The Rumpus, Full Stop, Cargo Literary, Booth and others. His work has been mentioned in The Paris Review Daily, by Andrew Sullivan in The Dish, Commonweal, Poetry Foundation and 3 Quarks Daily, among others. He is a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Boston who now lives in Oregon. When he is not writing about literature, he works in marketing communications at a technology firm in Beaverton, Oregon. Follow him on Twitter @RobertFay1. Email: robertfay23 [at] gmail.com
by Robert Fay In The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, China has made contact with a technologically-advanced alien civilization called Trisolaris. The aliens plan to invade earth and are cultivating a cadre of earthling collaborators, most of whom are Chinese nationals. The Trisolarians accomplished this, not by using sex or blackmail to recruit agents…
by Robert Fay In 1899 at the age of 59 Henry James began work on The Ambassadors, the first of his brilliant, ground-breaking final three novels that included The Wings of the Dove and finally The Golden Bowl. James’ biographer Leon Edel writes, “The Ambassadors was told by James in a complex, indirect style he…
by Robert Fay Kit Moresby, the enigmatic heroine of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky sits in a café in a French colonial city in North Africa. It’s 1949 (or thereabouts) and on the terrace Arab men wearing fezzes drink mineral water and swat flies. Kit and her American companions have just arrived by freighter…
by Robert Fay I’m not typically a reader of White House memoirs, but after finishing the new biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Our Man (2019) by George Packer, I became intrigued by depictions of Obama’s management style in dealing with Holbrooke, Hilary Clinton and others. I soon picked up The World As It Is (2018)…
by Robert Fay The great critic George Steiner in his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? (1959) believed the achievements of Russian literature in the 19th century stand as one of “three principal moments of triumph in the history of western literature, the other two being the Athenian dramatists and Plato and the age of Shakespeare.” Not…
by Robert Fay During the annus horribilis of 1968 when it became clear the U.S. would never “win” in Vietnam, John Wayne decided to star and direct in a propaganda film called The Green Berets. Wayne was a die-hard Orange County anti-communist who believed that the U.S. military was winning on the battlefield in South…
by Robert Fay Being American, as well as a Gen X-er who grew up on the lyrics of the Sex Pistols, “God save the queen…she’s not a human being,” I never quite understand the U.K.’s loyalty to the British Royal family. Up through the Edwardian era, aristocratic veneration made sense in many ways, but the…
by Robert Fay Lake Simcoe, Canada. The sound of the Chickering piano. Bach. He is lazing down a wooded foot path, teasing his collie Banquo with a stick. He wears gloves, a wool Donegal cap, muffler and long coat despite the July temperatures. He is not being self-consciously eccentric; he simply fears getting a chill,…
by Robert Fay In the winter of 1927 James Joyce was in desperate need of a kind word. It didn’t seem to matter that he was a genius, the man who’d published Ulysses five years earlier, an artist of such magnitude that another Irish genius—a young Samuel Beckett—worshipped him and acted as his personal secretary.…
by Robert Fay On the morning of August 20, 1968, the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel had a serious hangover. He was at his country home in Liberec after a night of boozing it up with his actor friend Jan Tříska, who would emigrate to the U.S. in 1977 and eventually appear in The Karate Kid…
by Robert Fay Near the end of Italy’s greatest 20th century novel, The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, the elderly Prince Salinas is slumped in an armchair on a Sicilian hotel balcony looking at Mounte Pelligrino. The Prince knows he’s dying, but even more poignantly, he understands centuries of Salinas aristocratic mores and traditions will…
by Robert Fay I get sad whenever I think of Robert Lowell. He is the poet of a lost America, an America that likely never was, but one that is gone nonetheless. I get sad when I think of Robert Lowell because of my own inadequacy to love poetry the way he did, the way…
by Robert Fay I spent my freshman year at a drab suburban college pining for the cosmopolitan life of Boston. I whined and schemed and eventually engineered a transfer to Suffolk University in the city, where I was certain I’d meet fabulous Bohemian people who chain-smoked unfiltered Camels and read Rimbaud and William Blake by…
by Robert Fay D.H. Lawrence had the goods on America. Like many foreign intellectuals and artists before and after, he was interested in the American “spirit of place” and its people’s curious experiment with displacement. He knew the “old American classics” stood toe-to-toe with the great Russian and French masterpieces of the 19th Century, but…
by Robert Fay The great Mexican writer Sergio Pitol died in April. He was 85, a recipient of the Cervantes Award—the highest honor for works in the Spanish language—and in his The Art of Flight trilogy, he writes of his 20 years living and working in Europe, “the thread that ties those years together, I’ve…