PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Jay Parini is a Professor of English at Middlebury College and is the author of the novels , The Last Station (adapted as an Academy Award-nominated film and translated into more than thirty languages) and Benjamin's Crossing. He has written biographies of Robert Frost, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck.
He has painted a portrait that is by turns shocking, witty and very funny - just like the much-missed man himself Evening Standard Writer, pundit, bon viveur, frequenter of chat-show couches, Vidal will be remembered by his contemporaries, Parini is sure, as a meteor who streaked through the night skies, with a fantail of sparks . He is less certain about future generations. Will they read him? It's impossible to know. With this fine biography, he has done his part in ensuring they will Independent a marvellous new biography ... a portrait that is both affectionate and balanced The Economist As much an intimate memoir as a scholarly biography -- Craig Brown Mail on Sunday Riveting Herald In a good year for biography, the life I enjoyed the most, a gossipy window on a great American, is Jay Parini's life of Gore Vidal, Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies -- Robert McCrum Observer This biography, filled with glittering names and acerbic wit, faithfully evokes the dangerous charm whose chilly dazzle even his melancholy last years could not quite extinguish Daily Mail
