Jay Parini's New Book Celebrated At Town Hall Theater 11/16

The release of a new Jay Parini novel is always an event. His newest novel, The Passages of H.M., will be celebrated at Town Hall Theater on Tuesday, November 16, the first event in this year's Vermont Bookshop Authors Series.

Parini will read from the new work and answer questions.

As The Passages of H. M. opens, we see, through the eyes of his long-suffering wife Lizzie, an aging, angry, and drunken Herman Melville wreaking domestic havoc in his unhappy New York home. He is decades past his flourishing career as a writer of bestselling tales of seagoing adventures. His epic but ungainly novel Moby-Dick was meant to make him immortal, but critics scoffed and readers fled. But within him is stirring, perhaps, one great work yet-the tale of a handsome sailor in the Napoleonic Wars, undone by one moment of uncontrollable rage.

Lizzie's chapters alternate with third-person accounts of Melville's crowded life: his shipping off to sea on a merchant vessel as an impoverished young aristocrat; his fateful voyage on a whaling ship; his instant fame as a novelist; his fateful encounter and soul-deep friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne; and the long years of physical decline and literary obscurity.

Jay Parini creates a Melville who is at once sympathetic and maddening. And one who, in thought and deed, is unambiguously attracted to men-a surmise well supported by the known biographical facts but still sure to create controversy. Parini penetrates the mind and soul of a literary titan, using the resources of fiction to humanize a giant while illuminating the sources of his matchless creativity.

The event is one of several planned for this year at Town Hall Theater. Vermont Bookshop owner Becky Dayton is working with THT to present authors who may draw crowds too big for readings in the cozy bookshop.

Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. His novels include The Apprentice Lover, Benjamin's Crossing, and The Last Station (now a major motion picture). His fifth volume of poetry was The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (2005). He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner, in addition to such nonfiction works as The Art of Teaching (2005), Why Poetry Matters (2008), and Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008). Parini's reviews and essays appear frequently in major periodicals, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian. He lives in Weybridge, Vermont.

The reading is Tuesday, November 16 at 7 pm at Town Hall Theater. Entrance to event is free of charge. There will be a cash bar.

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