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....

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....

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....

A reading by Jay Parini of 33 of his most celebrated poems....

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 13 children....

In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kind of novelistic memoir”, Jay Parini takes us back 50 years, when he fled the United States for Scotland - in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life....

By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially....