Dust jacket design by Kenneth Miyamoto. His first book.

Voyages

Najarian, Peter

Pantheon Books

The Artist and His Mother is a work of creative nonfiction in the form of a novel whose narrator, a painter and writer, composes not only a portrait of himself and his mother, Zaroohe, but a story of a century from when, as a child of ten, she survived the Armenian Genocide in 1915, to her death in America in 2006. The title is after Arshile Gorky’s famous paintings of himself and his own mother, and here also the composition is inspired by the ghosts of the massacre.

The Artist and His Mother

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The Press At University of California, Fresno

Ararat Press

This is an appealing and timely first novel by a young Armenian-American who writes of the difficulties of coming to terms with a second homeland that isn't always welcoming. Writing out of the memories of growing up "different" in an Armenian community on the Jersey side of the Hudson, Peter Najarian turns into lyrical and moving fiction his tale of disillusionment with America, its crassness, its inhumanity to ethnic groups, and its betrayal of the very values it proclaims. Aram, the young narrator of the novel, recounts stories of massacre and breakups of families in Armenia, lonely journeys to the New World, and painful new starts in strange and harsh circumstances. These stories of his parents and their generation become a rich counterpoint to his own story and his own generation, a very different tale, but one in which he tries to join his past with the present. Rejecting the example of his older brother, Aram refuses to become a conventional American, but even in Europe cannot escape the deep love he holds for his brother and for home. Turning once again towards America, Aram seems to contemplate a new confrontation, perhaps a better connection with his time and his country.

Daughters of Memory

Literature & Fiction

United States

City Miner Books

ABOUT THE BOOK The Paintings of Art Pinajian, A Family Story, is an illustrated non-fiction novel about an Armenian-American painter whose work sold for a fortune after he died, though he lived on the edge of poverty. Ashod "Archie" Pinajian was a Najarian on his mother's side, and what happened to his work became a universal story of greed and betrayal, yet his faith in the power of art was a redemptive force that never diminished. "It is between me and myself that I work now.... My work is a reflection of what I want my life to be.... To understand the totality of art is to arrive at its creation.... If you are conscious of Totality, time will coalesce everything into one.... Searching for forms is terrific therapy and makes me feel good and refreshed.... No one notices, of course, except the creator and sometimes not even he." From Archie's letters to his cousin Pete. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter Najarian is a passionate and idealistic American author, painter, basketball player and substitute teacher who resides in Berkeley, California.

The Paintings of Art Pinajian

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Regent Press

Peter Najarian writes prose in the very particular American tradition that includes Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, and Jack Kerouac. The Naked and the Nude is the seventh volume in his epic autobiographical narrative that works the territory between lyrical autobiography and the novel to tell his story and the story of his generation. Najarian’s subject—like Wolfe’s, Saroyan’s, Kerouac’s—is the male artist and the unsortable way in which a mix of sexual hunger and literary ambition, the hunger for a home and a belief in the transformative power of art, become both a wound and a way in the world. 
In Najarian’s case this story has as its ground Armenia, the story of the early twentieth century genocide, an immigrant life in America, and a fierce current of damage and love that works its way through the generations. As for art—it also matters that Najarian is a remarkable painter which makes The Naked and the Nude as much a book about seeing and making as it is a book about sexuality. The intensely vivid paintings and drawings reproduced here are reason enough to have the book on your shelf. — Robert Hass

The Naked & The Nude: A Nonfiction Novel

The Great American loneliness is an autobiography in the form of short narratives written between the Seventies and the Nineties. Its central theme, the journey of an artist in the middle of his life where the way is sometimes lost. The narratives move from America to India in the aftermath of the Sixties, painting a kind of road to the 1988 earthquake in Armenia, where amidst the human loss and suffering, the narrator learns again the impermanence of everything in life. Then, between portraits of his mother and her peasant Armenian roots, are the memoirs of his fellow artists in Oakland, California, and these point to the rest of the journey.  “Peter Najarian is a passionate and idealistic American who has been in exile from America—sometimes actually, sometimes metaphorically—for much of his life; and now he has published a really eloquent and compelling account of his many-layered journey, which I hope will find the warm and wide reception it deserves,” writes Michael Arlen about The Great American loneliness.  In his Preface addressed to “My Friends,” Najarian talks about himself and his work: “This loneliness is not just ‘American’ of course, but of a universal nature, or what we call the self’s search for the soul, yet it comes dressed in a culture, . . . When I was young I used this name [America] for the cause of my personal suffering, as if it were an enemy to what my ideal America was supposed to be, and when I lived in England I felt more natural as an alien than feeling one in the land where I was born. My parents had found refuge here, but I grew up longing for a home I imagined in their childhood.”  Later, he continues, “Then I realized I was not really starving but in love, and it was this love of making lines that kept me searching for my true subject, for I was in love not only with my soul but how it was mirrored in my friends who are my true America, my mother the most important of all. It is to them I dedicate this humble book.”  Interlaced with the stories are the author-artist’s drawings of elegant women, of his mother and self-portraits, and of landscapes. “I’ve been writing since boyhood, but I started painting late in life,” says Najarian. In The Great American loneliness he has successfully combined both artistic expressions to create an attractive volume.  “I am again bowled over by the power of your work,” says Leo E. Litwak. “It is lyrical, earthy, celebratory, grounded in the profane as it reaches for the sacred. Yours isn’t an E.M. Forster India but a more erotic and more fetid and spicier India that seems truer to me. I have more faith in your women than in any drawn by Henry Miller. Your writing, as well as your art, justifies your adoration of them.”  Peter Najarian is an accomplished contemporary American writer. His writings, mostly autobiographical, reflect his Armenian roots and his experience growing up in America. His first novel, Voyages, was published in 1971 by Pantheon Books, followed by Wash Me on Home Mama in 1978, and Daughters of Memory, in 1986.

The Great American Loneliness

Blue Crane Books, Incorporated

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Books by Najarian, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Najarian, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Voyages

The Artist and His Mother

Voyages

Voyages

Daughters of Memory

The Paintings of Art Pinajian

The Naked & The Nude: A Nonfiction Novel

The Great American Loneliness