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Conversations with Jay Parini

Conversations with Jay Parini PDF Author: Michael Lackey
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626741719
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
Jay Parini (b. 1948) is best known for his novel about Leo Tolstoy's last year, The Last Station, which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and made into a Hollywood film. But he has also published numerous volumes of poetry; biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck; novels; and literary and cultural criticism. This book contains the most important interviews with the former Guggenheim fellow; former Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; and former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London. Parini's work is valuable not just because of its high quality and intellectual range. Parini's life and writings often seem like a seminar table, with friends gathered, talking and trading stories. He has openly written poems in conversation with writers he knew personally: Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He has, in his own life, kept an ongoing conversation with many literary friends over the years—Alastair Reid, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Ann Beattie, Julia Alvarez, Peter Ackroyd, A. N. Wilson, and countless others. These interviews offer a more comprehensive understanding of Parini's work as a poet, scholar, public intellectual, literary critic, intellectual historian, biographer, novelist, and biographical novelist. More importantly, these interviews will contribute to our understanding of the history of ideas, the condition of knowledge, and the state of literature, all of which Parini has played an important role in shaping.

Borges and Me

Borges and Me PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385545835
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kindof novelistic memoir,” Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland—in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. Borges—visiting his translator in Scotland—is in his seventies, blind and frail. When Borges hears that Parini owns a 1957 Morris Minor, he declares a long-held wish to visit the Highlands, where he hopes to meet a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn. Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical mystery tour of an era, like our own, in which uncertainties abound, and when—as ever—it’s the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.

Conversations with Jay Parini

Conversations with Jay Parini PDF Author: Michael Lackey
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626741719
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
Jay Parini (b. 1948) is best known for his novel about Leo Tolstoy's last year, The Last Station, which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and made into a Hollywood film. But he has also published numerous volumes of poetry; biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck; novels; and literary and cultural criticism. This book contains the most important interviews with the former Guggenheim fellow; former Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; and former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London. Parini's work is valuable not just because of its high quality and intellectual range. Parini's life and writings often seem like a seminar table, with friends gathered, talking and trading stories. He has openly written poems in conversation with writers he knew personally: Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He has, in his own life, kept an ongoing conversation with many literary friends over the years—Alastair Reid, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Ann Beattie, Julia Alvarez, Peter Ackroyd, A. N. Wilson, and countless others. These interviews offer a more comprehensive understanding of Parini's work as a poet, scholar, public intellectual, literary critic, intellectual historian, biographer, novelist, and biographical novelist. More importantly, these interviews will contribute to our understanding of the history of ideas, the condition of knowledge, and the state of literature, all of which Parini has played an important role in shaping.

Robert Frost

Robert Frost PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1466877804
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Book Description
This fascinating reassessment 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 Robert Frost and working in the poet's archives at Dartmouth, Amherst, and elsewhere to produce this definitive and insightful biography 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.

One Matchless Time

One Matchless Time PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061751235
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description
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.

Why Poetry Matters

Why Poetry Matters PDF Author: Axinn Professor of English Jay Parini
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300124236
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
This deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives examines the importance of poetry and its diverse applications in the world.

The Way of Jesus

The Way of Jesus PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807047252
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
Renowned poet and novelist Jay Parini’s The Way of Jesus is a book for progressive Christians and spiritual seekers who struggle, as Parini does, with some of the basic questions about human existence: its limits and sadnesses, and its possibilities for awareness and understanding. Part guide to Christian living, part spiritual autobiography, The Way of Jesus is Jay Parini’s exploration of what Jesus really meant, his effort to put love first in our daily lives. Called “one of those writers who can do anything” by Stacy Schiff in the New York Times Book Review, Parini—a lifelong Christian who has at times wavered and questioned his beliefs—recounts his own efforts to follow Jesus’s example, examines the contours of Christian thinking, and describes the solace and structure one can find in the rhythms of the church calendar. Parini’s refreshingly undogmatic approach to Christian thinking incorporates teachings from other religions, as well as from poets and other writers who have helped Parini along his path to understanding.

The Damascus Road

The Damascus Road PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307386201
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
From the author of the international bestseller The Last Station, a superb historical novel of the Apostle Paul, whose tireless and epic preaching of the message of Jesus brought Christianity into existence and changed human history forever. In the years after Christ's crucifixion, Paul of Tarsus, a prosperous tentmaker and Jewish scholar, took it upon himself to persecute the small groups of his followers that sprung up. But on the road to Damascus, he had some sort of blinding vision, a profound conversion experience that transformed Paul into the most effective and influential messenger Christianity has ever had. In The Damascus Road novelist Jay Parini brings this fascinating and ever-controversial figure to full human life, capturing his visionary passions and vast contradictions. In relating Paul's epic journeys, both geographical and spiritual, he unfolds a vivid panorama of the ancient world on the verge of epochal change. And in the alternating voice of the Gospel writer Luke, Paul's travel companion, scribe, and ghostwriter, a cooler perspective on his actions and beliefs emerges -- ironic but still filled with wonder at Paul's unshakable commitment to the Christ and his divinity.

Benjamin's Crossing

Benjamin's Crossing PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525562753
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
The acclaimed and now-classic biographical novel of Walter Benjamin's last days--adapted into screenplay by Jay Parini. It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin--the German-Jewish critic and philosopher--has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America. Beloved biographical novelist Jay Parini's thrilling tale of escape is beautifully interwoven with vignettes of Benjamin's complex, cosmopolitan past: his privileged childhood in Berlin, his years with the German Youth Movement, his university days. His close friendship with Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, and many other well-known artists and intellectuals who were part of Benjamin's intimate circle between the two world wars. Part tragedy, part dark comedy, this sharply realized historical novel tells one of the great and most moving peripheral stories of the Holocaust.

Empire of Self

Empire of Self PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0345805836
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
An intimate, authorized yet totally frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925–2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini’s Empire of Self digs behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal’s colorful career to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truths underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well—a virtual Who’s Who of the twentieth century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Johnny Carson, Leonard Bernstein, and the crème de la crème of Hollywood. Also a generous helping of feuds with the likes of William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and The New York Times, among other adversaries. The life of Gore Vidal teemed with notable incidents, famous people, and lasting achievements that call out for careful evocation and examination. Jay Parini crafts Vidal’s life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death. Provided with unique access to Vidal’s life and his papers, Parini excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. This is the biography Gore Vidal—novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, historian, wit, provocateur, and pioneer of gay rights—has long needed.

Jesus

Jesus PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054402589X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
Profiles Jesus Christ as the human face of God, taking into the account the multiple ways his life has been viewed and retold, and dramatizing the transformation from a man to a myth.