Lecture Topics
A selection of the author's speeches:
- Wine-tasting with Jay
Other Areas of Expertise
- Cooking and Entertaining
- Literature and Fiction
More Information
Jay McInerney
Best-Selling Author of the Gen-X Classic, Bright Lights, Big City, and Passionate Oenophile
Base: New York, NY
- Photo: Marion Ettlinger
Jay McInerney's status as a best-selling novelist is established, but fans of his novels may not be aware of his long-term relationship with wine. McInerney expresses his love of wine as a frequent contributor to the glossy pages of House & Garden magazine. His accounts of visits to vineyards and the wines he has drunk are witty and enthusiastic in equal measure, but he is by no means a traditional wine critic. McInerney brings a relaxed attitude to wine and has led many wine-tastings and lectured to groups of both wine connoisseurs and casual-drinkers. His musings on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar and the forthcoming Hedonist in the Cellar. These columns are a happy combination of his twin passions for writing and for wineand give great advice too!
For those not as familiar with Jay McInerney's novels: he is the author of Bright Lights, Big City (which he adapted for the screen), Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, The Last of the Savages, Model Behavior and most recently The Good Life described by Michiko Kakutani (New York Times) as "A real love story . . . with a sympathy and depth new to McInerneys fiction . . . [In] The Good Life, the boom years have come to a dead halt with 9/11an event that rocks even his most jaded hedonists and propels his two central characters into a re-examination of their marriages, their careers and their dreams."
Works by this Speaker
Bacchus and Me
Jay McInerney on wine? Yes, Jay McInerney on wine! The best-selling novelist has turned his command of language and flair for metaphor on the world of wine, providing this sublime collection of untraditional musings on wine and wine culture that is as fit for someone looking for a nice Chardonnay as it is for the oenophile.
On champagne: Is Dom Pérignon worth four bottles of Moët & Chandon? If you are a connoisseur, a lover, a snob, or the owner of a large oceangoing craft, the answer ... is probably yes.
On the difficulty of picking a wine for a vegetarian meal: Like boys and girls locked away in same-sex prep schools, most wines yearn for a bit of flesh.
On telling the difference between Burgundy and Bordeaux: If its red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water thats left in the vase after the flowers have died, its probably Burgundy.
On the fungus responsible for the heavenly flavor of the dessert wine called Sauternes: Not since Baudelaire smoked opium has corruption resulted in such beauty.
Includes new material plus recommendations on the worlds most romantic wines and the best wines to pair with a meal.
Story of My Life
In his breathlessly paced new novel Jay McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole, twenty going on 40,000, is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel falling in and out of, lust, and abusing other people's credit cards. As Alison races toward emotional breakdown, McInerney gives us a hilarious yet oddly touching portrait of a postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing really matters.
Ransom
Ransom, Jay McInerney's second novel, belongs to the distinguished tradition of novels about exile. Living in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, Christopher Ransom seeks a purity and simplicity he could not find at home, and tries to exorcise the terror he encountered earlier in his travels—a blur of violence and death at the Khyber Pass.Ransom has managed to regain control, chiefly through the rigors of karate. Supporting himself by teaching English to eager Japanese businessmen, he finds company with impresario Miles Ryder and fellow expatriates whose headquarters is Buffalo Rome, a blues-bar that satisfies the hearty local appetite for Americana and accommodates the drifters pouring through Asia in the years immediately after the fall of Vietnam.Increasingly, Ransom and his circle are threatened, by everything they thought they had left behind, in a sequence of events whose consequences Ransom can forestall but cannot change.Jay McInerney details the pattern of adventure and disillusionment that leads Christopher Ransom toward an inevitable reckoning with his fate—in a novel of grand scale and serious implications.
Model Behavior
"A Great Gatsby for the end of the century." -- The Baltimore Sun
Jay McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, helped bring about a revolution in contemporary fiction in trade paperback. But more importantly, its publication brought us a major writer of great literary talent and incisive perception.
In his latest novel, Model Behavior, McInerney offers us the portrait of a doubting devotee of the city where vocation, career, and ambition (which only occassionally coincide) run head-on with friendship and love--or merely desire. We see Conor McKnight's well-earned ennui fast becoming anxiety as he tries to protect himself from the harrowing fate that unfolds before his bleary eyes. McInerney is at the peak of his craft in what is sure to become a classic at the end of the century.
This edition contains only the novel Model Behavior, and not the additional seven stories which were published in the original hardcover.
The Last of the Savages
From the bestselling author of Bright Lights, Big City and Brightness Falls comes a chronicle of a generation, as enacted by two men who represent all the passions and extremes of the class of 1969. Patrick Keane and Will Savage meet at prep school at the beginning of the explosive '60s. Over the next 30 years, they remain friends even as they pursue radically divergent destinies--and harbor secrets that defy rebellion and conformity.
Brightness Falls
he bestselling Brightness Falls--now in trade paper from the author of Bright Lights, Big City. In the story of Russell and Corrine Calloway, set against the world of New York publishing, McInerney provides a stunningly accomplished portrayal of people contending with early success, then getting lost in the middle of their lives.
Bright Lights, Big City
With the publication of Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, Jay McInerney became a literary sensation, heralded as the voice of a generation. The novel follows a young man, living in Manhattan as if he owned it, through nightclubs, fashion shows, editorial offices, and loft parties as he attempts to outstrip mortality and the recurring approach of dawn. With nothing but goodwill, controlled substances, and wit to sustain him in this anti-quest, he runs until he reaches his reckoning point, where he is forced to acknowledge loss and, possibly, to rediscover his better instincts. This remarkable novel of youth and New York remains one of the most beloved, imitated, and iconic novels in America.
The Good Life
Hailed by Newsweek as “a superb and humane social critic” with, according to The Wall Street Journal, “all the true instincts of a major novelist,” Jay McInerney unveils a story of love, family, conflicting desires, and catastrophic loss in his most powerfully searing work thus far.
Clinging to a semiprecarious existence in TriBeCa, Corrine and Russell Calloway have survived a separation and are thoroughly wonderstruck by young twins whose provenance is nothing less than miraculous, even as they contend with the faded promise of a marriage tinged with suspicion and deceit. Meanwhile, several miles uptown and perched near the top of the Upper East Side’s social register, Luke McGavock has postponed his accumulation of wealth in an attempt to recover the sense of purpose now lacking in a life that often gives him pause—especially with regard to his teenage daughter, whose wanton extravagance bears a horrifying resemblance to her mother’s. But on a September morning, brightness falls horribly from the sky, and people worlds apart suddenly find themselves working side by side at the devastated site, feeling lost anywhere else, yet battered still by memory and regret, by fresh disappointment and unimaginable shock. What happens, or should happen, when life stops us in our tracks, or our own choices do? What if both secrets and secret needs, long guarded steadfastly, are finally revealed? What is the good life?
Posed with astonishing understanding and compassion, these questions power a novel rich with characters and events, both comic and harrowing, revelatory about not only New York after the attacks but also the toll taken on those lucky enough to have survived them. Wise, surprising, and, ultimately, heart-stoppingly redemptive, The Good Life captures lives that allow us to see–through personal, social, and moral complexity–more clearly into the heart of things.
A Hedonist in the Cellar
In the two decades since Bright Lights, Big City reinvigorated contemporary fiction, Jay McInerney can claim a great many accomplishments, including the mantle that Salon has given him: “the best wine writer in America.” Of his previous collection, Bacchus and Me, Robert M. Parker, Jr., concluded: “Brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative.” And The New York Times added: “McInerney’s wine judgments are sound, his anecdotes witty, and his literary references impeccable. Not many wine books are good reads; this one is.”
In A Hedonist in the Cellar, he gathers more than five years’ worth of essays and continues his exploration of what’s new, what’s enduring, and what’s surprising, giving his palate a complete workout and the reader an indispensable, idiosyncratic guide to a world of almost infinite variety. Rieslings from the Finger Lakes, Armagnac from Gascony, powerhouse amarones from Valpolicella, the most fearsome critics in England, chocolate-friendly bottles from all over the globe, new developments in Chile and Argentina—these are only some of the delights now ready to be savored in a collection driven not only by wine itself but also the people who make it and those whose enjoyment is matched by their curiosity.
Full of terroir and flavor, svelte personalities, and keen insight into the trade, these are irresistible essays for anyone enthralled by the manifold pleasures of wine.
