What you’ll find here is biographical information about me as well as links to most of my books, plus links to many op-ed pieces I’ve written for CNN, Salon, and The Daily Beast.
For the most part, I’ve been writing poems, novels, biographies, and screenplays for four decades. You can find most of my poems in New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015. My latest novel is The Damascus Road, a novel about the life of Saint Paul.
If you like my work, look out for Borges and Me: An Encounter. It’s coming from Doubleday this summer -- an account of a strange, moving, often frustrating week on the road with the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in the spring of 1971. We rumbled around the highlands of Scotland in my 1957 Morris Minor, and this book is an account of that improbable journey.
Here’s wishing you all well.
— Jay Parini
“This is a jewel of a book. Very funny, clever, moving, luminous with love of literature and landscape. Parini’s portrait of both Borges and Scotland is exquisite, deeply affectionate, sometimes comically irritable. He uses all a novelist’s art, all his smoke and mirrors, to let the great man step shambolically from these pages to trap and beguile us, like a modern Ancient Mariner, with his brilliant, freely associative and heady metaphysics and literary table talk… I read it in a greedy gulp. My laughter (at poor Parini’s long night in bed with his subject) kept my wife awake. But by the end, I was damp around the eyes; I was sad to let this little cast of characters go. It’s hard to conceive of a how an old and frail blind man could have had such psychological force, such unworldly innocence, such redeeming sway over others, but Jay Parini persuades us fabulously in a high-style Borgesian marriage of fiction and history.”
— Ian McEwan
This reminiscence by Parini, who is now a prolific novelist, biographer and poet, brings Borges more sharply to life than any account I’ve read or heard. (I met Borges in Buenos Aires a few years after the events of this book.) In this sense, the memoir is an important contribution to the biography of a major writer. The bond that Borges and Parini forge during their improbable journey is moving, with its unexpected moments of confession and shared fragility... For readers who already admire Borges, this memoir will be a delicious treat. For those who have yet to read him, Parini provides the perfect entry point to a writer who altered the way many think of literature.
-- Michael Greenberg, The New York Times
"A classic comic-philosophical road story, playfully conscious of its own traditions. . . Many of the book’s loveliest passages are pure geography; as he drives, Jay describes to Borges the passing landscapes of Scotland, to which Borges adds literary and historical context. The pressure to capture Scotland in words for the great Jorge Luis Borges forces Jay to think about language in a new way, to “up his game” as a poet, and this artistic journey, occurring alongside their physical journey, becomes the book’s emotional backbone. . . A fun, tightly crafted, tenderhearted literary adventure, an improbable tale that, like many improbable tales, happens to be true."
— Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal
“Borges and Me is a road trip book like no other, written by someone who certainly didn’t spend his youth the way I did. I loved every minute of reading it. It’s full of wonderful energy and humor, with underpinnings of sadness and seriousness I can’t shake.”
— Ann Beattie