Jay Parini Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Love Run (1980)
  2. The Patch Boys (1986)
  3. The Last Station (1990)
  4. Bay of Arrows (1992)
  5. Benjamin’s Crossing (1997)
  6. The Apprentice Lover (2002)
  7. The Passages of H. M. (2010)
  8. The Damascus Road (2019)

Anthologies edited

  1. The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Short Stories (1987)

Non fiction

  1. Theodore Roethke, an American Romantic (1979)
  2. An Invitation to Poetry (1986)
  3. A Vermont Christmas (1988)
  4. Gore Vidal Writer Against the Grain (1992)
  5. John Steinbeck : A Biography (1994)
  6. Some Necessary Angels (1997)
  7. Robert Frost: A Life (1998)
  8. The Norton Book of American Autobiography (1999)
  9. Anthony Quinn’s Eye (2004)
  10. One Matchless Time (2004)
  11. The Art of Teaching (2005)
  12. Gore Vidal: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2007)
  13. Why Poetry Matters (2008)
  14. The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (2008)
  15. Promised Land (2008)
  16. Jesus (2013)
  17. Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies (2015)
  18. Empire of Self (2015)
  19. The Writer’s Reader (2016)
  20. The Way of Jesus (2018)
  21. Borges and Me (2020)

Novels Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Jay Parini Books Overview

The Patch Boys

The summer adventures some funny, some tragic of fifteen year old Sammy di Cantini, who is growing up in a mining region of Pennsylvania.

The Last Station

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREStarring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, & James McAvoyIn 1910, Count Leo Tolstoy, the most famous writer in the world, is caught in the struggle between his devoted wife and an equally devoted acolyte over the master’s legacy. Sofya Andreyevna fears that she and the children she has borne Tolstoy will lose all to Vladimir Chertkov and the Tolstoyan movement, which preaches the ideals of poverty, chastity, and pacifism. As Tolstoy seeks peace in his final days, Valentin Bulgakov is hired to be his secretary and enlisted as a spy by both camps. But Valentin’s loyalty is to the great man, who in turn recognizes in the young idealist his own youthful struggle with worldly passions. Deftly moving among a colorful cast of characters, drawing on the writings of the people on whom they are based, Jay Parini has created a stunning portrait of an enduring genius and a deeply affecting novel.

Benjamin’s Crossing

A New York Times Notable BookWalter Benjamin 1892 1940 was among the most important intellectuals of this century: a seminal critic and philosopher. He has, in the past three decades, acquired almost cult status in the academic world. In Benjamin’s Crossing, Jay Parini tracks Benjamin through his last, terrible months. The story opens with his desperate flight from Paris, on the heels of the Na*zi invasion in 1940. It depicts his various, often tragicomic, attempts to flee France, culminating in his frantic escape over the Pyrenees into Spain. Benjamin’s Crossing is a lyrical novel of ideas. It is also a love story dramatizing one of the most moving peripheral episodes of the Holocaust.

The Apprentice Lover

A poet and biographer, Jay Parini is also a novelist whose fiction has been acclaimed as ‘dazzli/ng,’ Los Angeles Times ‘achingly beautiful,’ Washington Post and ‘a subtle masterpiece’ John Bayley in the Times Literary Supplement. In his new novel, The Apprentice Lover, Parini evokes the gorgeous Mediterranean island of Capri during the summer of 1970 as the setting for a sensuous, deeply affecting story of a young American’s coming into his own and reconciling himself with his past. When Alex Massolini’s brother is killed in Vietnam, he drops out of Columbia University and leaves his conservative family behind for Capri to become secretary to Rupert Grant, a famous British novelist and poet, who dominates the island like a latter day Prospero. Alex soon finds himself ensnared in a web of love affairs, friendships, and rivalries within the eccentric community that inhabits the idyllic beauty of the isolated Italian island. Among that group are the selfish, cunning, and brilliant Rupert Grant; his wife Vera, a charming and sophisticated social manipulator; the elusive Holly and the mysterious Marisa, who act as Grant’s research assistants; the young philosophy student from the Sorbonne, Patrice LaRue; and Father Aurelio, who is desperate for parishioners. The Apprentice Lover traces a young American’s enchantment and disenchantment with his American past, with his new European mentor, and with the various characters on an island famous for its characters. As Alex stumbles upon intrigues and secrets, he tries to balance what others demand of him with his own nascent desires. His apprenticeship in love, literature, and life unfolds with a combination of Mediterranean clarity, wry humor, wit, and emotional power that only a master of fiction could orchestrate.

The Passages of H. M.

From the author of the international bestseller The Last Station, a stirring novel about the adventurous life and tragic literary career of Herman Melville. As The Passages of H. M. opens, we see, through the eyes of his long suffering wife Lizzie, an aging, angry, and drunken Herman Melville wreaking domestic havoc in his unhappy New York home. He is decades past his flourishing career as a writer of bestselling tales of seagoing adventures like Typee and Omoo. His epic but ungainly novel Moby Dick was meant to make him immortal, but critics scoffed and readers fled. His days are spent trudging the docks of New York as a customs inspector and contemplating his malign literary fate. But within him is stirring, perhaps, one great work yet the tale of a handsome sailor in the Napoleonic Wars, undone by one moment of uncontrollable rage…
Lizzie’s chapters alternate with third person accounts of Melville s crowded life: his shipping off to sea on a merchant vessel as an impoverished young aristocrat; his fateful voyage on a whaling ship; his desertion in the Marquesas Islands and sojourn with cannibals a great adventure and polymor phous sexual idyll and his instant fame as a novelist; his fateful encounter and soul deep friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne; and the long years of physical decline and liter ary obscurity. Jay Parini creates a Melville who is at once sympathetic and maddening, in sync with the vast forces of the universe and hopelessly impractical and abstracted. And one who, in thought and deed, is unambiguously attracted to men a surmise well supported by the known biographical facts but still sure to cre ate controversy. Parini penetrates the mind and soul of a liter ary titan, using the resources of fiction to humanize a giant while illuminating the sources of his matchless creativity.

An Invitation to Poetry

Designed for introductory students, this text represents a fresh approach to the study of poetry. The elements of poetry, both formal and structural aspects, are presented in a simple, highly available language. The text incorporates the latest developments in criticism such as the feminist perspective in an unobtrusive way.

Gore Vidal Writer Against the Grain

This collection of critical essays approaches the American writer and attempts to rectify the underestimation of his work. Jay Parini has drawn from the best of previously published criticism and commissioned fresh articles by leading contemporary critics Catharine R. Stimpson, Harold Bloom, Italo Calvino, among others to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal’s career. The collection also includes a recent interview with Parini in which Vidal candidly discusses his career as well as his troubled relationship with the reviewers.

John Steinbeck : A Biography

This reas*sessment of John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize winner, draws on the remniscences of his wife and friends, and on Steinbeck’s own huge legacy of letters, diaries and manuscripts, to create a portrait of a writer who established himself through sheer hard work, and whose greatest works captured the desperation and indignation experienced by ordinary Americans during the Great Depression.

Some Necessary Angels

Distinguished poet and novelist Jay Parini presents some of his best essays both classic and unpublished works on topics ranging from baseball to Frost and Emerson to the culture of creative writing. For aspiring writers, Some Necessary Angels is an illuminating glimpse into the workshop of a distinguished novelist and critic. For readers who share Parini’s love of language, it is an invigorating expression of faith.

Robert Frost: A Life

This fascinating reas*sessment of America’s most popular and famous poet reveals a more complex and enigmatic man than many readers might expect. Jay Parini spent over twenty years interviewing friends of Frost and working in the poet’s archives at Dartmouth, Amherst, and elsewhere to produce this definitive and insightful portrait of both the public and private man. While he depicts the various stages of Frost’s colorful life, Parini also sensitively explores the poet’s psyche, showing how he dealt with adversity, family tragedy, and depression. By taking the reader into the poetry itself, which he reads closely and brilliantly, Parini offers an insightful road map to Frost’s remarkable world.

The Norton Book of American Autobiography

‘The essential American form of expression.’ from the Introduction by Jay PariniFrom Mary Rowlandson’s story of her capture by Indians in the mid seventeenth century to Mary Paik Lee’s story of being a pioneer Korean woman in America at the beginning of the twentieth century, the autobiographical form has provided our most vivid, intimate glimpses of daily American life and self understanding. In this groundbreaking anthology, respected writer and critic Jay Parini brings together an abundant selection from over three centuries of ‘the democratic voice…
discovering itself.’ Here are the voices of the Founding Fathers and African American slaves; of transcendentalists and suffragists; of ancestors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and many others; and of a wide range of contemporaries, including Maxine Hong Kingston, Gore Vidal, Julia Alvarez, and Mark Doty. The rich, continuous influence of autobiographical writing in our culture is clear, and as memoirs continue to fascinate readers, this invaluable anthology provides an essential guide to our foremost American literary tradition.

Anthony Quinn’s Eye

An elegant collection of photographs and essays documenting Anthony Quinn’s remarkable life in art. In the sumptuous pages of Anthony Quinn’s Eye, ‘one encounters the world of one of the most interesting men of our time,’ writes poet and novelist Jay Parini. As an artist, Quinn was versatile, deft, and prolific tirelessly sketching, painting, and sculpting to give form to an insistent inner vision. As a collector, his enthusiasm for cultural artifacts, artworks, and books was vast. Anthony Quinn’s Eye is a portrait in words and pictures of this creative force. Donald Kuspit examines the impulse behind Quinn’s desire to create and collect. Quinn’s legendary acting talent ‘life force on celluloid’ is celebrated here by Tom Roberts, who traces Quinn’s career from his days as a studio actor to the later roles that earned him a place in the cultural firmament. Personal reflections by his widow, Katherine Quinn, and longtime friend Kirk Douglas complete this unique appreciation of a fascinating man. 156 color and 65 duotone plates.

One Matchless Time

William Faulkner was a literary genius, and one of America’s most important and influential writers. Drawing on previously unavailable sources including letters, memoirs, and interviews with Faulkner’s daughter and lovers Jay Parini has crafted a biography that delves into the mystery of this gifted and troubled writer. His Faulkner is an extremely talented, obsessive artist plagued by alcoholism and a bad marriage who somehow transcends his limitations. Parini weaves the tragedies and triumphs of Faulkner’s life in with his novels, serving up a biography that’s as engaging as it is insightful.

The Art of Teaching

Becoming an effective teacher can be quite painful and exhausting, taking years of trial and error. In The Art of Teaching, writer and critic Jay Parini looks back over his own decades of trials, errors, and triumphs, in an intimate memoir that brims with humor, encouragement, and hard won wisdom about the teacher’s craft. Here is a godsend for instructors of all levels, offering valuable insight into the many challenges that educators face, from establishing a persona in the classroom, to fostering relationships with students, to balancing teaching load with academic writing and research. Insight abounds. Parini shows, for instance, that there is nothing natural about teaching. The classroom is a form of theater, and the teacher must play various roles. A good teacher may look natural, but that’s the product of endless practice. The book also considers such topics as the manner of dress that teachers adopt and what this says about them as teachers, the delicate question of politics in the classroom, the untapped value of emeritus professors, and the vital importance of a settled, disciplined life for a teacher and a writer. Parini grounds all of this in personal stories of his own career in the academy, tracing his path from unfocused student a self confessed ‘tough nut to crack’ to passionate writer, scholar, and teacher, one who frankly admits making many mistakes over the years. Every year, thousands of newly minted college teachers embark on their careers, most with scant training in their chosen profession. The Art of Teaching is a perfect book for these young educators as well as anyone who wants to learn more about this difficult but rewarding profession.

Why Poetry Matters

Poetry doesn t matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities that life affords. Poetry indeed matters.

A gifted poet and acclaimed teacher, Parini begins by looking at defenses of poetry written over the centuries. He ponders Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus, and moves on through Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, and others. Parini examines the importance of poetic voice and the mysteries of metaphor. He argues that a poet’s originality depends on a deep understanding of the traditions of political poetry, nature poetry, and religious poetry.

Writing with a casual grace, Parini avoids jargon and makes his case in concise, direct terms: the mind of the poet supplies a light to the minds of others, kindling their imaginations, helping them to live their lives. The author s love of poetry suffuses this insightful book a volume for all readers interested in a fresh introduction to the art that lies at the center of Western civilization.

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The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist is America’s premier man of letters. No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay. This long needed volume comprises some twenty four of his forays into criticism, reviewing, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. Among them are such classics as ‘The Top Ten Best Sellers,’ Dawn Powell: The American Writer, Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy,’ ‘Po*rnography,’ and ‘The Second American Revolution. Edited and introduced by Gore Vidal’s literary executor, Jay Parini, it will stand as one of the most enjoyable and durable works from the hand and mind of this vastly accomplished and entertaining immortal of American literature.

Promised Land

These thirteen books must be seen as representative, not definitive, works. They are nodal points, places where vast areas of thought and feeling gathered and dispersed, creating a nation as various and vibrant as the United States, which must be considered one of the most successful nation states in modern history, and a republic built firmly on ideas, which are contained in its major texts. Where we have been must, of course, determine where we are going. My hope is that this book helps to show us where we have been and engenders a lively conversation about our destination, which seems perpetually in dispute.
from Promised Land

Americans need periodic reminding that they are, to a great extent, people of the book or, rather, books. In Promised Land, Jay Parini repossesses that vibrant, intellectual heritage by examining the life and times of thirteen ‘books that changed America.’ Each of the books has been a watershed, gathering intellectual currents already in motion and marking a turn in American life and thought. Their influence remains pervasive, however hidden, and in his essays Jay Parini demonstrates how these books entered American life and altered how we think and act in the world.

The thirteen ‘books that changed America’:
Of Plymouth Plantation The Federalist Papers The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin The Journals of Lewis and Clark Walden Uncle Tom’s Cabin Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Souls of Black Folk The Promised Land How to Win Friends and Influence People The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care On the Road The Feminine Mystique

Promised Land offers a reading of the American psyche, allowing us to reflect on what our past means for who we are now. It is a rich and immensely readable work of cultural history that will appeal to all book lovers and students of the American character alike.

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