Jay McInerney in conversation with David Ulin

This talk took place September 26, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Jay McInerney’s first book, Bright Lights, Big City, sold to Random House for $7500, and, when published in 1984, catapulted him into the ranks of literary sensation.  Since then, he’s written six other novels, a collection of short stories, and three collections of essays on wine. A student of Raymond Carver and a former fact-checker at The New Yorker, McInerney wrote a wine column for the Wall Street Journal for four years. He lives in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York.

David L. Ulin is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

McInerney’s first novel in ten years unfolds across a period of stupendeous change—including Obama’s historic election and the global economic collapse. In Bright, Precious Days, he revists his characters Corinne and Russell Calloway, who are living the dream life in New York City.  They find themselves — and their marriage — tested more severely than they ever could have imagined, as Russell, an independent publisher, encounters an audacious, potentially game-changing opportunity, and Corinne, devoted to feeding the poor, faces a man with whom she’d had an ill-fated affair in the wake of 9/11.