Ransom (28 page)

JAY McINERNEY
writes a wine column for the Wall Street Journal and is a regular contributor to the
Guardian
, the
New York Times Book Review
and
Corriere della Sera
. He has written seven novels, including
Bright Lights, Big City
, cited by
Time
as one of the nine generation-defining novels of the twentieth century, two short story collections and three non-fiction books on wine, one of which was the acclaimed
A Hedonist in the Cellar
. In 2006, he received the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation. He lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton, New York.

FICTION
The Last Bachelor
How It Ended
The Good Life
Model Behaviour
The Last of the Savages
Brightness Falls
Story of My Life
Bright Lights, Big City

NONFICTION
The Juice
A Hedonist in the Cellar
Bacchus and Me

Bright Lights, Big City

‘A rambunctious, deadly funny novel that goes for the right mark – the human heart' Raymond Carver

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.

‘The seminal novel of the 1980s'
New York Times

‘Distinctive and sophisticated … extremely funny'
Sunday Times

‘McInerney earns his place in literary history with
Bright Lights, Big City
, the comic morality tale of a spoilt young man making a mess of his life in Manhattan … a landmark evocation of the wasteful decade it lampoons'
Guardian

‘A super-smart, touching novel
…
captures the loneliness and libertine isolation of New York life'
The Times

Story of My Life

‘Line for line, it's one of the funniest novels I have ever read' John Sutherland,
London Review of Books

It's party time. Alison lives for the moment in a carnival of gossip and midnight sessions of Truth or Dare, and her cocaine-bashing friends crave satiation. Young and beautiful, sex-crazed and alcohol-fuelled, Alison juggles rent money with abortion fees, lingering lovers with current conquests and is the despair of her gynaecologist. Story of her life right? But in a world of no consequences, Alison is heading for a meltdown.

‘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

Brightness Falls

‘A funny, self-mocking, sometimes brilliant portrait of Manhattan's young literary and Wall Street crowd, our latest Lost Generation'
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 where prospects and money seem to be flying everywhere, and all vie for riches, fame and the love of beautiful people. But the Calloways soon find out that what goes up must come crashing down, both on Wall Street and at home.

‘McInerney has a gift for the simultaneous perception of the glamour and tawdriness of city life and the novel pulsates with his trademark sense of excitement about living in New York'
Evening Standard

The Last of the Savages

‘Gives Scott Fitzgerald's fictional world a modern make-over'
Sunday Times

When Patrick Keane arrives at an exclusive New England prep school in the Sixties he meets his roommate, the radical Will Savage. The last in the line of a privileged white family from the Mississippi Delta, Will disavows his father's expectations and embraces the searing anthems of black soul music. From wildly different backgrounds, Patrick and Will form an unlikely friendship that is to span three decades, from the turbulent Sixties to the Nineties.
The Last of the Savages
is a dazzling exploration of interracial love, music, family and enduring friendship.

‘A moving portrait of friendship … Funny and touching'
Tatler

Model Behaviour

‘A fast-paced, funny tale of true love gone wrong, full of McInerney's wit and style'
Cosmopolitan

Connor's girlfriend is off to California, allegedly on a fashion shoot, but something tells him she might never come back. His friend Jeremy has a dog being held to ransom for reasons too Machiavellian to blurb. Connor's sister Brook, genius and anorexic, is busy anguishing over Rwanda and Bosnia. His editor at
Ciao Bella
is only concerned about the celebrity of the month. Thanks goodness for Pallas, a knock-out table dancer with a heart of gold.

‘
Model Behaviour
does for the 90s what
Bright Lights, Big City
did for the 80s … New York, New York: so good he nailed it twice'
Independent on Sunday

The Good Life

‘Tender and moving … of all the 9/11 books this is possibly the only one that will pass the test of time'
Arena

Ten years on, Russell is still a literary editor; Corrine watches anxiously over their children at home. Across town, Luke is struggling to reconnect with his wife and their angst-ridden daughter. These two families are teetering on the brink of change when 9/11 happens.
The Good Life
explores that territory between hope and despair, love and loss, regret and fulfilment. This is McInerney doing what he does best, presenting us with New York in all its moral complexity.

‘A shrewd, acidic portrait of literary life in Manhattan at the turn of this already frightful century'
Guardian

How It Ended

‘Sharp, spare, exquisitely observed writing'
Daily Mail

Discover a world of sex, excess and urban paranoia where worlds collide, relationships fragment and the dark underbelly of the American dream is exposed. A transsexual prostitute accidentally propositions his own father. A senator's serial infidelities leave him in hot water. And two young lovers spend Christmas together high on different drugs. McInerney's characters struggle together in a shifting world where old certainties dissolve and nobody can be sure of where they stand.

‘McInerney is the type of American novelist to whom English readers instinctively warm …
How It Ended
is the work of a fine writer on the top of his form'
Sunday Telegraph

The Juice
Vinous Veritas

‘Superlative … McInerney writes with a charismatic flair'
Financial Times

Jay McInerney has written unique, witty, vinous essays for over a decade. Here, with his trademark flair and expertise, McInerney provides a master class in the almost infinite varieties of wine, painting a collage of the people and places that produce it all over the world, from historic past to the often confusing present. Stretching from France and South Africa to Australia and New Zealand, McInerney's tour is a comprehensive and thirst-inducing expedition that explores viticulture, investigates great champagne and delves into a vast array of styles, capturing the passion that so many people feel for the world of wine.

‘Wonderful … McInerney loves wine, and he writes beautifully about it … often insightful and funny'
The Times

A Hedonist in the Cellar
Adventures in Wine

‘A cracking read'
Daily Telegraph

Jay McInerney, internationally celebrated author of 
Bright Lights, Big City
, turns his hand here to his lifelong love affair with wine. Pearls of wisdom are offered on the subjects of the best wine for romantics, the parallels between Californian wines and floundering Hollywood stars, the choice of wine for the author's own debauched forty-eighth birthday party, the ‘high-testosterone grape' that is Colin Farrell, absinthe, ‘the wild green fairy', and what wine is best drunk with chocolate. At the same time McInerney is a genuine connoisseur, taking the reader on a tour through the wine regions of the world and imparting tried and tested advice on grapes and vintages, bouquets, noses and finishes.

‘McInerney's wine judgements are sound, his anecdotes witty, and his literary references impeccable. Not many wine books are good reads; this one is'
New York Times

Buy these books at
www.bloomsbury.com/jaymcinerney

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd1986

Copyright @ 1985 by Jay McInerney

This electronic edition published 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved.
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eISBN: 978-1-4088-5452-5

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