• 1989 MacArthur Fellows Program

Novels

• Great Neck: a novel, Knopf, 2003, ISBN 9780375413940
• The Death of Che Guevara, Knopf, 1983, ISBN 9780394517674
• Krazy Kat: a novel in five panels, Knopf, 1988, ISBN 9780394550251

Essays

• The Space Between: Literature and Politics, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, ISBN 9780801826726
• On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother. Knopf, 1991, ISBN 9780394587523

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.