Showing results for "jay parini"

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Jay Parini

An intimate, authorized yet totally frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925–2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past centuryThe 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...

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Jay Parini

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...

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Jay Parini

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, h...

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Jay Parini

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...

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Jay Parini

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREStarring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, & James McAvoyIn 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...

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Jay Parini

“Nothing less than spellbinding . . . It’s an eye-opener. Anecdotal without being tawdry, analytical without being academic, it captures the essence of Faulkner’s life with the narrative drive of a novel.” — Houston Chronicle“A splendid life of William Faulkner . . . Not only readable but downright enthralling.” — Seattle TimesWilliam Faulkner was a literary genius, and one of America's most important and influential writers. Drawing on previously unavailable sources--inclu...

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Jay Parini

Distinguished poet and novelist Jay 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.

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Jay Parini

Jay Parini's biography of the poet, Theodore Roethke. Parini views Roethke through the lens of a Romantic poet. With this incredibly researched and well written work, Parini reaffirms Roethke's reputation as a poet that came into his own after the publication of "The Lost Son," and then continued to develop from there and greatly extended his reputation with further works.

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Jay Parini

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 ou...

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Jay Parini

From the author of the international bestseller The Last Station, a stirring novel about the adventurous life and tragic literary career of Herman Melville.As The Passages of H. M. opens, we see, through the eyes of his long-suffering wife Lizzie, an aging, angry, and drunken Herman Melville wreaking domestic havoc in his unhappy New York home. He is decades past his flourishing career as a writer of bestselling tales of seagoing adventures like

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Jay Parini

“Part spiritual guide, part academic excavation…Inspiration abounds."****― Christian Science Monitor**“****Highly literate treatment of a vital element in the Christian tradition.” —**Kirkus Reviews**“To be read and savored.” —**Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale University and author of The Cost of Ambition and co-author of Life Worth Living...

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Jay Parini

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 immen...