Publication Order of Calloway Books
| Brightness Falls | 1992 |
| The Good Life | 2006 |
| Bright, Precious Days | 2016 |
| See You on the Other Side | 2026 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Bright Lights, Big City | 1984 |
| Ransom | 1985 |
| Story of My Life | 1988 |
| The Last of the Savages | 1996 |
| Model Behavior | 1998 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| How It Ended | 2009 |
| The Last Bachelor | 2009 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar | 2000 |
| A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine | 2006 |
| The Juice: Vinous Veritas | 2012 |
About Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney (born 1955) is an American novelist best known for “Bright Lights, Big City” (1984), a novel of 1980s New York told in the second person, and for a sequence of four novels about the marriage of Russell and Corrine Calloway. The last of them, “See You on the Other Side”, was published in April 2026.
McInerney was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 13 January 1955 and graduated from Williams College in 1976. He worked as a reporter on a weekly newspaper in New Jersey, then went to Japan on a fellowship in 1977 and taught English in Kyoto. He arrived in Manhattan in 1979 and was hired as a fact checker at The New Yorker the following year. He later took a master’s degree in English at Syracuse University, where he studied writing with Raymond Carver.
“Bright Lights, Big City” was published by Vintage in 1984. Its protagonist is a 24-year-old fact-checker at a highbrow magazine who spends his nights in the cocaine-fuelled party scene after his wife leaves him. The title comes from a blues song by Jimmy Reed. McInerney wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film, directed by James Bridges and starring Michael J. Fox. A 1987 article in the Village Voice grouped him with Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz as the literary “brat pack”.
“Ransom” (1985) is set among expatriates in Kyoto, and “Story of My Life” (1988) centres on Alison Poole, a character Ellis later used in “American Psycho” and “Glamorama”. The Calloway novels begin with “Brightness Falls” (1992), set in New York publishing in the 1980s. “The Good Life” (2006) takes place around the attacks of 11 September 2001 and won the Grand Prix Littéraire at the Deauville Film Festival in 2007. “Bright, Precious Days” (2016) is set against the Great Recession, and “See You on the Other Side”, published by Knopf, finds the couple in their sixties.
His story collection “How It Ended” (2009) was named one of the ten best books of the year by Janet Maslin of The New York Times. McInerney has also written about wine for House & Garden, The Wall Street Journal and Town & Country, and has published three books of wine essays. He co-wrote the screenplay for the television film “Gia” (1998), which starred Angelina Jolie.
Photo: David Shankbone, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).