'A brilliant and moving work - unique, refreshing, imaginatively powerful' New York Times You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not... So begins our nameless hero's trawl through the brightly lit streets of Manhattan, sampling all this wonderland has to offer yet suspecting that tomorrow's hangover may be caused by more than simple excess. Bright Lights, Big City is an acclaimed classic which marked Jay McInerney as one of the major writers of our time.

Country & Townhouse's Best Book for Christmas, 2018 A delectable anthology celebrating the finest writing on wine. In this richly literary anthology, Jay McInerney - bestselling novelist and acclaimed wine columnist for Town & Country, the Wall Street Journal and House and Garden - selects over twenty pieces of memorable fiction and nonfiction about the making, selling and, of course, drinking of fine wine. Including excerpts from novels, short fiction, memoir and narrative nonfiction, Wine Reads features big names in the trade and literary heavyweights alike. We follow Kermit Lynch to the Northern Rhone, while long-time New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling raises feeding and imbibing on a budget in Paris into something of an art form. Michael Dibdin's fictional Venetian detective Aurelio Zen gets a lesson in Barolo, Barbaresco and Brunello vintages from an eccentric celebrity, and writer and gourmet Joseph Wechsberg visits the medieval Chateau d'Yquem to sample different years of the roi des vins. Also showcasing an iconic scene from Rex Pickett's Sideways and work by Jancis Robinson, Roald Dahl, Auberon Waugh and McInerney himself, this is an essential volume for any disciple of Bacchus.

'Stylish observation ...Suspenseful and well told' Lionel Shriver, Financial Times It is 2008 and Russell and Corrine Calloway have spent half their lives in the bright lights of New York. Obama and Clinton are fighting for leadership and the collapse of Lehman Brothers looms. Meanwhile, Russell is running his own publishing company, and clinging to their downtown loft; Corrine manages a charity, and is desperate to move somewhere with more space for their twins. Although they try to forget each other's past indiscretions, when Jeff Pierce's posthumous novel gathers a new cult following, the memory of their friend begins to haunt the couple. Then, with devastating timing, Corrine's former lover makes an unexpected reappearance...

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 Mo‘t & 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 it’s red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that’s left in the vase after the flowers have died, it’s 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 world’s most romantic wines and the best wines to pair with a meal

Originally published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1988, and now reissued by Grove Press, The Story of My Life by Jay McInerney is a hilarious, sobering portrait of 1980s New York City featuring twenty-something actress Alison Poole and her coterie of club-hopping, coke-addicted friends. In this breathlessly paced novel, McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole 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 funny yet oddly touching portrait of a postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing really matters.

First published in Paris in 1955, and originally banned in the United States, J. P. Donleavy's first novel is now recognized the world over as a masterpiece and a modern classic of the highest order. Set in Ireland just after World War II, "The Ginger Man" is J. P. Donleavy's wildly funny, picaresque classic novel of the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American ne'er-do-well studying at Trinity College in Dublin. He barely has time for his studies and avoids bill collectors, makes love to almost anything in a skirt, and tries to survive without having to descend into the bottomless pit of steady work. Dangerfield's appetite for women, liquor, and general roguishness is insatiable--and he satisfies it with endless charm.

Photographer Christophe von Hohenberg's photographs give the impression of squinting against the glaring summer sun-bleached out details blur and feint gestures carve out the presence of figures against the vast oceanic expanse. Allowing himself to be "blinded by the light" von Hohenberg has found harmony on the beaches of the Hamptons, a place that cleanses, renews, and soothes. As delicate smears and ghostly shapes flesh out the familiar yet distant dreamscape of the beaches, von Hohenberg's photographs intimate an ineffable feeling-haunting, serene, and sublime. The White Album of the Hamptons provides a visual record of von Hohenberg's experiment in capturing the soul of the Hamptons and its unseen world of transcendent illumination through black-and-white photographs.

The tragicomedy of a young man in NYC, struggling with the reality of his mother's death, alienation and the seductive pull of drugs.

A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental montage and collage techniques borrowed from the cinema, and the jumbled case histories of a picaresque range of characters from dockside crapshooters to high-society flappers, Dos Passos constructs a brilliant picture of New York City as a great futuristic machine filled with motion, drama and human tragedy.

Corrine Calloway is a young stockbroker on Wall Street, her husband Russell an underpaid but ambitious publishing editor. The happily married couple head into New York's 1980s gold rush, awash with prospects and promise, where the best and brightest vie with the worst and most craven for riches, fame and the love of beautiful people. But the Calloways soon discover that what goes up must come crashing down, both on Wall Street and at home. Brightness Falls captures lives-in-the-making: men and women confronting adulthood with wit and low behaviour, fear and confusion, and, just occasionally, a little honesty and decency.

In "A Hedonist in the Cellar, " Jay McInerney 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. Filled with delights oenophiles everywhere will savor, this is a collection driven not only by wine itself but also the people who make it.
An entertaining, irresistible book that is essential for anyone enthralled by the myriad pleasures of wine.

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.

"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.

A generous new collection by the acclaimed novelist who, according to "Salon, " is also "the best wine writer in America."
For more than a decade, Jay McInerney's vinous essays have been praised by restaurateurs ("educational and delicious at the same time" --Mario Batali), by esteemed critics ("brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative" --Robert Parker), and by the media ("McInerney's wine judgments are sound, his anecdotes witty, and his literary references impeccable" --"The New York Times"). Here, in pieces originally published in" House & Garden" and "The Wall Street Journal, " McInerney provides a master class in the almost infinite varieties of wine and the people and places that produce it, with the trademark style and expertise that prompted the James Beard Foundation to grant him the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing in 2006.

_______________ 'Line for line, it's one of the funniest novels I have ever read' - John Sutherland, London Review of Books 'Story of My Life is quite as brilliant as Bright Lights, Big City' - Sunday Times 'McInerney has proven himself not only a brilliant stylist but a master of characterisation, with a keen eye for the incongruities of urban life' - New York Times Book Review _______________ It is party time in eighties Manhattan. Smart, sassy and cynical, Alison lives for the moment. Her life is a carnival of gossip and midnight sessions of Truth or Dare, and her cocaine-bashing friends and flirting flatmates all crave satiation. Young and beautiful, hip and indulgent, sex-crazed and alcohol-fuelled, Alison can neither pay her fees for drama school nor track down her indifferent father. She juggles rent money with abortion fees, lingering lovers with current conquests and is the despair of her gynaecologist. She's fallen deeply in lust with Dean, although that nasty present Skip Pendleton left her with hasn't yet cleared up. Story of her life, right? But in a world of no consequences, Alison is heading for a meltdown. _______________ 'McInerney's novels, filled with the depiction of glamorous imbecilities and hilarious excesses, are acute about a certain kind of Manhattan amorality. They offer a swift, intelligent guide to the latest racket' - Observer

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.