Jay Cantor

Jay Cantor (born 1948 New York City) is an American novelist, and essayist.

He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. He teaches at Tufts University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.

His work appeared in The Harvard Crimson. He was on the 2009 ArtScience Competition jury.

Awards

• 1989 MacArthur Fellows Program

Works

Novels

• The Death of Che Guevara, Knopf, 1983, ISBN 978-0-394-51767-4
• Krazy Kat: a novel in five panels, Knopf, 1988, ISBN 978-0-394-55025-1
• Great Neck: a novel, Knopf, 2003, ISBN 978-0-375-41394-0
• Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka, Knopf, 2014, ISBN 978-0385350341

Essays

• The Space Between: Literature and Politics, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, ISBN 978-0-8018-2672-6
• On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother. Knopf, 1991, ISBN 978-0-394-58752-3

Reviews

To call Jay Cantor the thinking man's Tom Wolfe is a little unfair to Tom Wolfe, who surely believes, and with some justification, that he's the thinking man's Tom Wolfe. It's also a little unfair to Jay Cantor, who for all I know abhors Wolfe's politics and his fiction as well. Yet the scope of Cantor's ambition in his teeming new novel, Great Neck; his avid desire to capture the American scene entire; his crowd of characters, each absorbed in a private drama; certain thrillingly compact episodes that stand out like a prodigy among dull schoolkids; the hankering after abandoned tradition (Cantor is fascinated by the cabala, Wolfe by the Stoics); the stern morality operating just below the surface of the narrative -- all these things, it seems to me, link these two writers, both of whom ardently believe in the power of fiction to bring an American moment to life.

External links

• "Jay Cantor talks about food", Cantabrigia
• "An Interview with Jay Cantor", Ken Capobianco and Jay Cantor, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Summer, 1990), pp. 3–11
• "Jay Cantor. Great Neck. (Book Review)", The Review of Contemporary Fiction, June 22, 2003, James Crossley