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.

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.

An intimate, authorized, yet 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 probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal’s colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well–a virtual who’s who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.

The life of Gore Vidal was an amazingly full one–full of colorful incident, famous people, and lasting achievements–that calls 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, he excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. This is the biography Gore Vidal has long needed.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

A New York Times Notable Book

As Leo Tolstoy’s life draws to a tumultuous close, his tempestuous wife and most cunning disciple are locked in a whirlwind battle for the great man’s soul. Torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity and the reality of his enormous wealth and thirteen children, Tolstoy dramatically flees his home, only to fall ill at a tiny nearby rail station. The famous (and famously troubled) writer believes he is dying alone, unaware that over a hundred newspapermen camp outside awaiting hourly reports on his condition.
 
Jay Parini moves deftly between a colorful cast of characters to create a stunning portrait of one of the world’s most treasured authors. Dancing between fact and fiction, The Last Station is a brilliant and moving literary performance.

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.

A new collection, the first in well over a decade, from acclaimed poet Jay Parini, which revolves around his deep connection to nature and underlines his concerns about the impacts of pollution and climate change. Published on the heels of a major new biography of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, 10/2015), and around the same time as the anticipated release of a new film based on his book Benjamin’s Crossing, this collection will also be his first since the release of the popular and acclaimed film The Last Station, based on his novel of that same title. In these beautiful, haunting poems, Parini writes about the landscapes of Mining country, of the railroads of Pennsylvania, of farm country, of world’s lost, families dispersed, faith tried and contested.

A reading by Jay Parini of thirty-three of his most celebrated poems.

Jay Parini’s readings are always an event, but too rare. For the first time, Parini has recorded his best known and most recent poems in an audiobook that welcomes the listener to enter his universe, which revolves around his deep connection to nature and underlines his concerns about the impacts of pollution and climate change. The audiobook follows the pattern of his popular readings, with the poet introducing each poem with context and comments, invariably revealing and often amusing. In these beautiful, haunting poems, Parini writes about the landscapes of mining country, of the railroads of Pennsylvania, of farm country, of worlds lost, families dispersed, faith tried and contested.