Parini to read from new book

This year’s Vermont Bookshop Authors Series starts off with a bang with the release of author (and D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing)Jay Parini’s newest novel, The Passages of H.M. The novel’s release will be celebrated at Town Hall Theater on Tuesday, November 16. Parini will read from his new work and answer questions. Entrance to the reading is free of charge.

The Passages of H. M. tells the tale of one angry, drunken Herman Melville through the eyes of his weary wife, Lizzie. Melville is known today as the author of the classic novel Moby-Dick — however, Parini paints the famous writer’s story in a very different and darker light.

In Passages, Melville, once a celebrated writer of seafaring adventures, now finds his career in shambles; his newest novel Moby-Dick was meant to make him immortal and solidify his position among the great writers, but it fell short in both the critics’ and readers’ eyes. Now Melville has one last work in mind — one that could bring him back from the cold depths of literary oblivion.

Parini depicts Melville as a man both sympathetic and maddening, and he penetrates the mind and soul of this liter-ary 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 the Theater to present authors who may draw crowds too big for readings in her bookshop.

Parini’s novels include The Apprentice Lover, Benjamin’s Crossing, and The Last Station, which is now a major motion picture. His fifth volume of poetry was The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (2005). He has also 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.