Jay Parini

LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 'For readers who already admire Borges, this memoir will be a delicious treat. For those who have yet to read him, Parini provides the perfect entry point to a writer who altered the way many think of literature' - New York Times In frantic flight from the Vietnam War, Jay Parini leaves the United...

Why Poetry Matters is a brief, passionate book about the nature of poetry and its use in the world. Poetry doesn’t matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end...

'This is a jewel of a book. Very funny, clever, moving, luminous with love of literature and landscape. Jay Parini's portrait of both Borges and Scotland is exquisite, deeply affectionate, sometimes comically irritable. He uses all a novelist's art, all his smoke and mirrors, to let the great man step shambolically from these pages to trap and beguile us, like...

There is no such thing as history, you see. It's a dream, perhaps even a dream of a dream... Walter Benjamin is dead. One of the most radiant minds of the twentieth century has been snatched away by death in a small town on the border between Spain and France. His thousand-page manuscript, carried the length of France during his...