Jay Parini has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 13 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is Borges and Me.
Borges and Me
Summary
An apprentice writer has an entirely unexpected encounter with literary genius Jorge Luis Borges that will profoundly alter his life and work. A poignant and comic literary coming-of-age memoir. "This is a jewel of a book." (Ian McEwan) Jay Parini was an aspiring poet and graduate student of literature at University of St. Andrews in Scotland; he was also in flight from being drafted into service in the Vietnam War. One day his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, asked Jay if he could play host for a "visiting Latin American writer" while he attended to business in London. He agreed - and that "writer" turned out to be the blind and aged and eccentric master of literary compression and metaphysics, Jorge Luis Borges. About whom Jay Parini knew precisely nothing. What ensued was a seriocomic romp across the Scottish landscape that Borges insisted he must "see", all the while declaiming and reciting from the literary encyclopedia that was his head, and Jay Parini's eventual reckoning with his vocation and personal fate.
©2020 Jay Parini (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Way of Jesus
Summary
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' 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.
©2018 Jay Parini (P)2018 Beacon Press
Benjamin's Crossing
Summary
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.
©1996 Jay Parini (P)2021 Random House Audio
Empire of Self
Summary
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 30 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.
©2015 Jay Parini (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Last Station
Summary
Set in the last tumultuous years of Leo Tolstoy's life, The Last Station centers on the battle for his soul waged by his wife, Sofya Andreyevna, and his leading disciple, Vladimir Cherkov. Torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity and the reality of his enormous wealth, his 13 children, and a life of relative luxury, Tolstoy makes a dramatic flight from his home. Too ill to continue beyond the tiny rail station at Astapovo, he believes that he is dying alone, while over one hundred newspapermen camp outside awaiting hourly reports on his condition. A brilliant re-creation of the mind and tortured soul of one of the world's greatest writers, The Last Station is a richly inventive novel that dances between fact and fiction.
©2007 Jay Parini (P)2008 Random House