Books

This volume revolves around his deep connection to nature and underlines his concerns about the impacts of pollution and climate change. In these beautiful, haunting poems, Parini writes about the landscapes of mining country, of the railroads of Pennsylvania, of farm country, of worlds lost and families dispersed. He explores faith and how it is tested. He limns the deepest crevices of the human heart and soul. He surprises and moves us.

Jay Parini brings a life’s worth of contemplation on Jesus to the first volume in ICONS, a series of brief, thought-provoking biographies edited by James Atlas. In Jesus, Parini turns the powerful narrative skill he’s wielded over the course of a four-decade career to a figure who’s dominated our collective imagination and cultural iconography for over twenty centuries

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.

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.

Poems discuss nature, the changing seasons, the author's past in the coal-mining country of Pennsylvania, and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Chronicles Steinbeck's early struggles, the period that produced his Pulitzer-prize winning "The Grapes of Wrath," his difficult first and second marriages, and his stormy friendships with numerous celebrities.

Poems explore a variety of themes including reading, suburbs, Kampuchea, spring, love, and history.

Fifteen-year-old Sammy di Cantini, resident of a mining region of Pennsylvania, is determined to rise above his class, falls disastrously in love with a Protestant, and visits his Mafia brother in New York where he becomes involved in impossible struggles.

This is not simply an introduction to Roethke Collected Poems. It is an attempt to isolate major patterns in the work, to discover the poet's mythos, and to relate his body of writing to the Romantic tradition, its proper context.

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.

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 cre­ate controversy. Parini penetrates the mind and soul of a liter­ary titan, using the resources of fiction to humanize a giant while illuminating the sources of his matchless creativity.

A compilation of fifty-nine new poems and forty-three from previous collections, The Art of Subtraction demonstrates Parini's wide range of poetic registers. One sequence of poems responds to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Others deal with personal themes and continue Parini's ongoing exploration of the relationship between language and mind. The poems drawn from previous collections have been carefully chosen to represent the breadth of his work and of his experience as an American poet over the course of his career.

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.

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.

A college professor obsessed with writing an epic poem about the journey of Christopher Columbus finally gets a grant and takes his family to the Dominican Republic where Columbus first saw inhabitants of the New World.

Color photographs and an evocative, anecdotal text capture the beauty, simplicity, and special quality of Vermont town and country life at Christmas.

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.

Moving nimbly between the great watersheds in American letters—including Walden, Huckleberry Finn, The Souls of Black Folk, and On the Road—Parini demonstrates how these books entered American life and altered how we think and act in the world. An immensely readable and vibrant work of cultural history, Promised Land exposes the rich literary foundation of our culture, and is sure to appeal to all book lovers and students of the American character alike.

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.

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.

A fictional re-creation of the life and times of intellectual, philosopher, and critic Walter Benjamin follows his intriguing life up to his final days, when he was to flee Paris ahead of the 1940 Nazi invasion.

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.

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.

Maisie Danston, a rich, sexy senior at Dartmouth College, has everything--brains, beauty and a boyfriend. But Teddy Leskovitch becomes obsessed with her, spying on her at every opportunity--until his overwhelming desire drives him to kidnap her in a wild, desperate attempt to prove his love.