'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.

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 "The Good "Life, 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 wonderstruck by young twins whose provenance is nothing less than miraculous. 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. 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.
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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.