{"product_id":"bright-precious-days-isbn-9781101972267","title":"Bright, Precious Days","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom the author of \u003ci\u003eBright Lights, Big City \u003c\/i\u003ecomes an unforgettable New York story of glamour, sex, ambition, and heartbreak.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An art form of sustained intimacy. . . . A portrait of a marriage in full.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Our modern-day Fitzgerald.” —\u003ci\u003eVanity Fair\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRussell and Corrine Calloway seem to be living the dream: a calendar filled with high-society parties; jobs they care about and enjoy; twin children, a boy and a girl whose birth was truly miraculous; a loft in TriBeCa and summers in the Hamptons. But beneath the glossy surfaces, things are simmering. Russell, editor-in-chief of a boutique publisher, has cultural clout but is on the edge financially, and feels compelled to pursue an audacious—and potentially ruinous—opportunity. Meanwhile, Corrine’s world is turned upside down when the man with whom she’d had an ill-fated affair in the wake of 9\/11 suddenly reappears, and the Calloways find themselves tested more severely than they ever could have imagined. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe third book in McInerney’s celebrated Calloway trilogy, \u003ci\u003eBright, Precious Days\u003c\/i\u003e is an aching, extraordinary portrait of a marriage during a period of dizzying change.“An art form of sustained intimacy. . . . A portrait of a marriage in full.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Our modern-day Fitzgerald.” —\u003ci\u003eVanity Fair\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Irresistible.” —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Quietly affecting. . . . Mellow, earnest, almost elegiac.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“McInerney is the writer who is funniest and most precise about the view from New York City.” —\u003ci\u003eHarper’s \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “McInerney delivers encounters and relationships, at times hilarious and exhilarating or excruciating between and among those individuals who are compelled to live nowhere else but on that tiny sliver of granite—Manhattan. Non-residents worldwide will enjoy the fates of these metropolitan dancers who wriggle, pop, squirm and sizzle under the searing red ray of McInerney’s magnifying glass.” —Dan Aykroyd \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “In this powerful portrait of a marriage and a city in the shadow of the looming subprime mortgage crisis, McInerney observes the passage of life’s seasons with aching and indelible clarity.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003eJay McInerney is the author of seven previous novels, a collection of short stories and three collections of essays on wine. He lives in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e www.jaymcinerney.com\u003cbr\u003e @jaymcinerney\u003cbr\u003e facebook.com\/jaymcinerneypageChapter 1\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Once, not so very long ago, young men and women had come to the city because they loved books, because they wanted to write novels or short stories or even \u003ci\u003epoems\u003c\/i\u003e, or because they wanted to be associated with the production and distribution of those artifacts and with the people who created them. For those who haunted suburban libraries and provincial bookstores, Manhattan was the shining island of letters. New York, New York: It was right there on the title pages—the place from which the books and magazines emanated, home of all the publishers, the address of \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e, where Hemingway had punched O’Hara and Ginsberg seduced Kerouac, Hellman sued McCarthy and Mailer had punched everybody, where—or so they imagined—earnest editorial assistants and aspiring novelists smoked cigarettes in cafés while reciting Dylan Thomas, who’d taken his last breath in St. Vincent’s Hospital after drinking seventeen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern, which was still serving drinks to the tourists and the young litterateurs who flocked here to raise a glass to the memory of the Welsh bard. These dreamers were people of the book; they loved the sacred New York texts: \u003ci\u003eThe House of Mirth\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGatsby\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBreakfast at Tiffany’s\u003c\/i\u003e et al., but also all the marginalia: the romance and the attendant mythology—the affairs and addictions, the feuds and fistfights. Like everyone else in their lousy high school, they’d read \u003ci\u003eThe Catcher in the Rye\u003c\/i\u003e, but unlike everyone else they’d really \u003ci\u003efelt\u003c\/i\u003e it—it spoke to them in their own language—and they secretly conceived the ambition to one day move to New York and write a novel called \u003ci\u003eWhere the Ducks Go in Winter\u003c\/i\u003e or maybe just \u003ci\u003eThe Ducks in Winter\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Russell Calloway had been one of them, a suburban Michigander who had an epiphany after his ninth-grade teacher assigned Thomas’s “Fern Hill” in honors English, who subsequently vowed to devote his life to poetry until \u003ci\u003eA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man \u003c\/i\u003echanged his religion to fiction. Russell went east to Brown, determined to acquire the skills to write the great American novel, but after reading \u003ci\u003eUlysses\u003c\/i\u003e—which seemed to render most of what came afterward anticlimactic—and comparing his own fledgling stories with those written by his Brown classmate Jeff Pierce, he decided he was a more plausible  Maxwell  Perkins  than  a  Fitzgerald  or  Hemingway.  After a postgraduate year at Oxford he moved to the city and eventually landed a coveted position opening mail and answering the phone for legendary editor Harold Stone, in his leisure hours prowling the used bookstores along Fourth Avenue in the Village, haunting the bars at the Lion’s Head and Elaine’s, catching glimpses of graying literary lions at the front tables. And if the realities of urban life and the publishing business had sometimes bruised his romantic sensibilities, he never relinquished his vision of Manhattan as the mecca of American literature, or of himself as an acolyte, even a priest, of the written word. One delirious night a few months after he arrived in the city, he accompanied an invited guest to a \u003ci\u003eParis Review \u003c\/i\u003eparty in George Plimpton’s town house, where he shot pool with Mailer and fended off the lisping advances of Truman Capote after snorting coke with him in the bathroom.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Though the city after three decades seemed in many ways diminished from the capital of his youth, Russell Calloway had never quite fallen out of love with it, nor with his sense of his own place here. The backdrop of Manhattan, it seemed to him, gave every gesture an added grandeur, a metropolitan gravitas.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303128223973,"sku":"NP9781101972267","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781101972267.jpg?v=1767723077","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/bright-precious-days-isbn-9781101972267","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}