Literary Cocktail Hour with author, Jay Parini, and his book "Borges and Me: An Encounter."

On Friday, February 12 at 5:00 pm, the Brattleboro Literary Festival featured Vermont author Jay Parini, and a discussion of his book "Borges and Me: An Encounter."
In 1971 Jay Parini was an aspiring poet and graduate student of literature at University of St. Andrews in Scotland; he was also in flight from being drafted into service in the Vietnam War. One day his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, asked Jay if he could play host for a “visiting Latin American writer” while he attended to business in London. He agreed-and that “writer” turned out to be the aged and eccentric master of literary compression and metaphysics, Argentine poet, writer and translator Jorge Luis Borges whose books set the stage for the magical realism movement in the the 20th century. About whom Jay Parini knew literally nothing. Borges was blind, talkative, vital -and up for adventure. What ensued was a seriocomic romp across the Scottish landscape that Borges insisted he must “see,” all the while declaiming and reciting from the literary encyclopedia that was his head, and Jay Parini’s eventual reckoning with his vocation and personal fate. Parini will be in conversation with author and Emerson College professor Rosario Swanson.
“The last book that made me laugh-Jay Parini’s Borges and Me, a road novel, partly true, in which the youthful, earnest would-be poet Parini has foisted upon him the aged, blind writer of whose works Parini is unaware and made to drive him around Scotland in 1969.” Richard Flanagan in The Guardian, 1/24/21.
“For readers who already admire Borges, this memoir will be a delicious treat. For those who have yet to read him, Parini provides the perfect entry point to a writer who altered the way many think of literature.” Michael Greenberg, New York Times 8/18/20