Conversations With Jay Parini

Author : Michael Lackey
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1626741719
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conversations with Jay Parini written by Michael Lackey and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jay Parini
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 198489949X
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Borges and Me written by Jay Parini and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jay Parini
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
ISBN 13 : 1466877804
Total Pages : 545 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Robert Frost written by Jay Parini and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jay Parini
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061751235
Total Pages : 524 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book One Matchless Time written by Jay Parini and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jay Parini
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 030738618X
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Promised Land written by Jay Parini and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively exploration of America’s intellectual heritage, acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Jay Parini celebrates the life and times of thirteen books that helped shape the American psyche. 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.

Author : Jay Parini
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0307741303
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Station written by Jay Parini and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, & James McAvoy In 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.

Author : Jay Parini
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0307386201
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Damascus Road written by Jay Parini and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Axinn Professor of English Jay Parini
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300124236
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Poetry Matters written by Axinn Professor of English Jay Parini and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Fernando Sorrentino
Publisher : Paul Dry Books
ISBN 13 : 1589882849
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges written by Fernando Sorrentino and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on 1982 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These wide-ranging conversations have an exceptionally open and intimate tone, giving us a personal glimpse of one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary world literature. Interviewer Fernando Sorrentino, an Argentinian writer and anthologist, is endowed with literary acumen, sensitivity, urbanity, and an encyclopedic memory of Jorge Luis Borges' work (in his prologue, Borges jokes that Sorrentino knows his work "much better than I do"). Borges wanders from nostalgic reminiscence to literary criticism, and from philosophical speculation to political pronouncements. His thoughts on literature alone run the gamut from the Bible and Homer to Ernest Hemingway and Julio Cortázar. We learn that Dante is the writer who has impressed Borges most, that Borges considers Federico García Lorca to be a "second-rate poet," and that he feels Adolfo Bioy Casares is one of the most important authors of this century. Borges dwells lovingly on Buenos Aires, too. From the preface: For seven afternoons, the teller of tales preceded me, opening tall doors which revealed unsuspected spiral staircases, through the National Library's pleasant maze of corridors, in search of a secluded little room where we would not be interrupted by the telephone…The Borges who speaks to us in this book is a courteous, easy-going gentleman who verifies no quotations, who does not look back to correct mistakes, who pretends to have a poor memory; he is not the terse Jorge Luis Borges of the printed page, that Borges who calculates and measures each comma and each parenthesis. Sorrentino and translator Clark M. Zlotchew have included an appendix on the Latin American writers mentioned by Borges

Author : Robert Pack
Publisher : UPNE
ISBN 13 : 9780874515602
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writers on Writing written by Robert Pack and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1991 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From deeply personal perspectives, two dozen established writers ponder the mystery of their art and such fundamentals as: What is a genuine writing impulse? Why does good writing work? How is writing learned? What is the role of craft and technique? Who is meant to be a writer? How is close reading related to good writing? The volume is peppered with critical perspectives and practical advice, yet its special richness and inspiration lie in the wonderment and deep love for the act of writing expressed by each contributor. Each essay is a joy to read, blending storytelling, literary anecdotes gathered from a lifetime of avid reading, and the kind of shoptalk exchanged between colleagues. Writers will find here camaraderie and encouragement, teachers of writing will hear practical testimony to what works, and readers will come away with a renewed awe for the spell cast by good writing"--From back cover.