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.^[1] He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.^[2]

His work appeared in The Harvard Crimson.^[3] He was on the 2009 ArtScience Competition jury.^[4]

• 1989 MacArthur Fellows Program

• 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^[5]
• Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka, Knopf, 2014, ISBN 978-0385350341

• 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

• "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