Donald B. Kuspit, Author, Jay Parini, Author, Tom Roberts, Author W. W. Norton & Company $75 (227p) ISBN 978-0-393-06008-9
As a successful actor, Anthony Quinn could easily have lived a life of mindless pleasure. This lavish record of his artistic endeavors shows he did just the opposite. Compiled largely by his second wife, Katherine, who wrote the foreword and some of
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Jay Parini, Author Henry Holt & Company $0 (218p) ISBN 978-0-8050-0047-4
This appealing coming-of-age novel takes place in a Pennsylvania mining town during the summer of 1925. Sammy di Cantini, 15 and very bright, lives with his family in a lower-class neighborhood called ""the patch.'' With his friend Will, he spends...
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Jay Parini. Doubleday, $35 (480p) ISBN 978-0-385-53756-8
Acclaimed biographer Parini (Robert Frost: A Life) draws on his 30 years of friendship and conversation with Gore Vidal (1925–2012), as well as on deep archival research, to offer a simultaneously admiring and candid portrait. With an elegance...
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Jay Parini. Amazon Publishing/New Harvest, $20 (192p) ISBN 978-0-544-02589-9
“Remythologizing” Jesus is the aim of this slim biography. Parini (The Last Station), a much published professor of English and creative writing at Middlebury College, wishes to present neither a scholarly investigation of the historical Jesus nor...
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Jay Parini, Author Henry Holt & Company $30 (535p) ISBN 978-0-8050-1673-4
This biography of the popular American novelist (1902-1968) is absorbing and generous. Parini, a professor of English literature and creative writing at Middlebury College, poet and novelist (Bay of Arrows), draws on interviews with dozens of people,
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Jay Parini, Author Warner Books $9.99 (0p) ISBN 978-0-446-39295-2
Alternating narrators from Count Leo Tolstoy's household tell of his attempts to balance his philosophy of poverty and his privileged lifestyle by living humbly in his final days. ``In the end, it is not the people around him who speak most...
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Jay Parini, Author Henry Holt & Company $0 (290p) ISBN 978-0-8050-1176-0
Inspired by diaries kept by members of the household of Count Leo Tolstoy, Parini ( The Patch Boys ) here offers a searching view of the last year in the life of the author of War and Peace . His venture is complex, making use of alternating...
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Jay Parini, Author Henry Holt & Company $22.5 (383p) ISBN 978-0-8050-1676-5
Parini's ( The Last Station ) larky, clever novel follows unlikely and amusing parallel lives: those of Christopher ``Geno'' Genovese, a talented but frustrated and restless poet and professor of English at a small New England college, and no less...
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Jay Parini, Author Henry Holt & Company $10.95 (79p) ISBN 978-0-8050-0577-6
Most of the poems in Parini's third collection are a conventional celebration of domesticity. One section focuses on the sweetness of paternity and family life; another sings the praises of ""the neighborliness of little towns,/ the expectations...
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Jay Parini, Author . HarperCollins $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-621071-1
Literary figures large and small populate this smoothly written coming-of-age novel by Parini (The Last Station) set on the island of Capri. Alex Massolino, raised by his mother to be the family's "brainy" boy, is a student at Columbia...
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Jay Parini, Author Henry Holt & Company $35 (528p) ISBN 978-0-8050-3181-2
March 26 marks the 125th anniversary of Frost's birth, and there could be no better tribute for a poet so often underrated, maligned and misunderstood than this sympathetic and balanced portrayal. Frost has been depicted as selfish and vindictive in
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Jay Parini, Author Henry Holt & Company $23 (306p) ISBN 978-0-8050-3180-5
In a formidable display of intellectual and imaginative sympathy, Parini (The Last Station, etc.) novelizes the life and death of Walter Benjamin, one of the major literary and cultural critics of the 20th century. A German Jew whose circle of...
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Jay Parini, Author Columbia University Press $85 (288p) ISBN 978-0-231-11070-9
Parini (The Last Station) got his title from a quote by Wallace Stevens extolling ""the necessary angel of reality."" Without it, says Parini, ""we can have no poetry, no imagination, and no politics....We must learn to sit down before reality like...
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Jay Parini, Doubleday, $26.95 (464p) ISBN 978-0-385-52277-9
Novelist, poet, and biographer Parini (The Last Station) drops in on Herman Melville via Melville's wife, Lizzie, in this solid if sometimes slow nod to one of literature's greats. Twenty years into their marriage, Lizzie's faith in H.M.'s writing...
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Jay Parini, Author . Doubleday $24.95 (385p) ISBN 978-0-385-52276-2
Poet, novelist and literary critic Parini (The Last Station
) examines the books he believes represent the soul of the American republic. Some of these books are masterpieces, others icons of a moment in American history. Throughout, Parini makes...
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Jay Parini, Author . Oxford Univ. $20 (160p) ISBN 978-0-19-516969-0
A prolific poet, novelist, biographer and critic, Parini (One Matchless Time: A Biography of William Faulkner
) has also taught throughout his career. He offers fresh musings about teaching's demands and what it takes to not lose one's other,
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Jay Parini, Author . HarperCollins $29.95 (492p) ISBN 978-0-06-621072-8
Veteran novelist and biographer Parini (Robert Frost
; The Last Station
) crafts a thorough account of the Nobel laureate's life (1897–1962), pausing with the publication of each book to reprise its plot and critical reception, and add his
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A. Kenneth Ciongoli, Author, Ken Ciongoli, Author, Jay Parini, Author . Regan Books $29.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-06-008902-3
In this slim though surprisingly informative illustrated homage to the Italian-American experience, Ciongoli and Parini (coeditors of Beyond the Godfather) begin their history with the history of America. While the authors mention the great Italian
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Jay Parini. Beacon, $26.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-8070-4724-8
In this gracious and instructive book, poet and novelist Parini (The Last Station) builds a plan for living out what Jesus meant when he commanded his followers to put love first. Parini describes growing up in Scranton, Penn., and how his father’s...
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Jay Parini. Doubleday, $27.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-385-52278-6
Parini’s fantastic latest (after Empire of Self) recounts the journeys of Paul of Tarsus as told from the apostle’s own perspective and that of his traveling companion, Luke, the Gospel’s author. A deeply intelligent and observant Jew determined to...
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Jay Parini. Doubleday, $27.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-54582-2
In this astute memoir, novelist Parini (The Last Station) writes of leaving Pennsylvania in 1971 to pursue a PhD in literature at St. Andrews in Scotland. There, he describes himself as the “last 22-year-old virgin in the Age of Aquarius” as he...
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