Works by
Jay McInerney
(Writer)
[January 13, 1955 - ]

Audio

• The Business & Other Stories (1999), Harlan Elliso
  Audio cassette

Fiction

• How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (2007 UK Release, 2009 US Release)
  From the writer whose first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, defined a generation and whose seventh and most recent, The Good Life, was an acclaimed national best seller, a collection of stories old and new that trace the arc of his career over nearly three decades.
  
  Only seven of these stories have been published in book form, but all twenty-two unveil and recreate the manic flux of our society. Whether set in New England, Los Angeles, New York, or the South, they capture various stages of adulthood, from early to budding to entrenched to resentful: a young man confronting the class system at a summer resort; a young woman holed up in a remote cabin while her (married) boyfriend campaigns for the highest office of all; a couple whose experiments in sexuality cross every line imaginable; an actor visiting his wife in rehab; a doctor who treats convicts and is coming to terms with his own criminal past; a youthful socialite returning home to nurse her mother; an older one scheming for her next husband; a family celebrating the holidays while mired in loss year after year; and even Russell and Corrine Calloway, whom we first met in Brightness Falls.
  
  A manifold exploration of delusion, experience, and transformation, these stories display a preeminent writer of our time at the very top of his form.

• The Good Life (2007)
  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 Omnibus (2004)
  Story of my Life and Brightness Falls.

• Glamour Attitude (2000)

• Model Behavior: A Novel and Stories (1998)
  With five novels over the past fourteen years, Jay McInerney has demonstrated time and again "his talent for capturing the nuances and idiosyncrasies of our culture" (San Francisco Chronicle), and nowhere is this more apparent than in Model Behavior, in which he returns to the locale of Bright Lights, Big City, Story of My Life, and Brightness Falls: the restless isle of Manhattan, where neither wishes nor even dreams ever sleep.
  
  Connor McKnight--former acolyte of film, Zen and Japanese literature--is not unaware that these  avocations are wildly remote from his present occupation (fledgling celebrity journalist). Moreover, his longtime girlfriend, the fashion model Philomena, suddenly seems curiously remote herself--and soon enough appears to have decamped, avec diaphragm, for the other coast. Then there's the sister with whom he shared a flamboyantly addled childhood, and who now matches her brilliance for theoretical abstraction with a compassion for world suffering so acute that her own well-being is imperiled.
  These and other anxieties, Connor finds, can scarcely be assuaged by his trio of flirting obsessions--a gorgeous stripper, a screenplay-in-progress in his drawer, the notion of a meaningful future--or by his principal ally and best friend, a monkishly neurotic, militantly vegetarian writer whose sanity balances precisely on the publication of his new story collection and on the fate of his Irish terrier.
  
  So now, as Thanksgiving and Christmas bear down upon him, not to mention a female admirer who's stalking him by e-mail, Connor gropes his hapless, hilarious way toward not so much salvation as self-preservation, favoring the right things as he is relentlessly pursued by all the wrong, bad, ill-advised or plain unlucky.
  
  Model Behavior is McInerney at full tilt--while the seven stories included trace the arc of his career and, in their exploration of the varieties of delusion, fame and experience, display anew his rare ability to comprehend and re-create the manic flux of our society.  

• The Last of the Savages (1996)
  Following the success of Brightness Falls--"his most ambitious novel" (The Boston Globe)--Jay McInerney now gives readers a sweeping story of a friendship as complex as it is abiding. Interweaving deeply personal dilemmas and the politics of race, sex, family, and society, The Last of the Savages moves from New England to the deep South and beyond, from the fevers of youth to the uneasy truths of middle age.

• Queen and I (1996)

• Brightness Falls (1992)
  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.

• Story of My Life (1988)
  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 (1985)
  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.

• Bright Lights, Big City (1984)
  The tragicomedy of a young man in NYC, struggling with the reality of his mother's death, alienation and the seductive pull of drugs.
  Movie (1988), James Bridges, director with Michael J. Fox and Kiefer Sutherland DVD  VHS

• Come Down From The Sky Light under Japanese Language Book (Date?)

Other

• A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine (2006)
  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. 

• Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar (2002)
  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.

See also:

• Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds (2007) by Daphne Merkin, Jay McInerney, Maureen Gibbon, Paul Theroux, Robert Coover, and Robert Stone
  With the first Centerfold, who just happened to be the radiant Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner masterminded a cultural icon: Playboy's Playmate of the Month. Now, for the first time ever, Playboy has gathered together every Centerfold from every issue into one luxurious collector's edition. That's over 600 beauties. We've reproduced these Centerfolds exactly as they appeared in the magazine to create a full-size, deluxe volume. Paging through this colossal, chronological collection provides a breathtaking view of our evolving appreciation of the female form: from the fifties fantasy of voluptuous blondes to the tawny beach girls of the seventies to the groomed and toned women of today. Housed in a handsome leather briefcase lined with velvet, this impressive tome is the ultimate indulgence for every passionate collector.

• Dressed to Kill: James Bond -- The Suited Hero (1996), Jay McInerney, ed.
  With works by Nick Foulkes, Neil Norman, and Nick Sullivan; and Illustrations by Auro Lecci and Colin Woodhead.

• Cowboys, Indians and Commuters: The Penguin Book of New American Voices (1994), Jay McInerney, ed.