Jerome Charyn

"Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature." --Michael Chabon "One of our finest writers." --Jonathan Lethem "One of our most intriguing fiction writers." --O, The Oprah Magazine "Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons." --New Yorker Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works. Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators--a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin's daughter--who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski's personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity. Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel.

"Vivid and sensitive." -- Publishers Weekly. Inspired by Herman Melville's novella, this graphic novel recounts a gifted and na ve young man's recruitment by the Soviet secret service and his adventures in New York City as a spy. The tale begins in the aftermath of World War II, when a Ukrainian orphan with remarkable psychic powers is selected and trained by the KGB. Two decades later he arrives in the United States to lead a double life. Operating under the name Billy Budd, he conducts espionage while working with a construction crew that builds skyscrapers. Billy's rescue of a co-worker and the resulting friendship lead the agent in the direction of a spiritual existence, a previously unimaginable possibility. But can Billy escape his Soviet masters? This edition features a new English translation by author Jerome Charyn, who previously collaborated with illustrator Fran ois Boucq on the acclaimed graphic novel The Magician's Wife. An Introduction by Paul Pope, author and illustrator of Batman: Year 100, provides additional insights into this Cold War thriller. Suggested for mature readers.

PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist O, The Oprah Magazine "Best Books of Summer" selection "Magnetic nonfiction." --O, The Oprah Magazine "Remarkable insight ...[a] unique meditation/investigation... Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these." --Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wild Nights! and The Lost Landscape We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote: My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- ... Though I than He-- may longer live He longer must--than I-- For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die-- Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today. Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. He lives in New York.

This unforgettable portrait of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy to create an achingly human portrait of the sixteenth president. Charyn conducts an orchestra of historical figures and fictional extras centered around a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and his sons Robert, Willie, and Tad is explored with penetrating psychological insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn s President Lincoln comes to vibrant, three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely seen in historical fiction."

After decades of madness in the Bronx, Isaac Sidel visits the craziest state in the country Isaac Sidel is too popular to be America’s vice president. Once the New York Police Department commissioner, he became the most beloved mayor in the city’s history—famous for his refusal to surrender his Glock, and for his habit of disappearing for months at a time to fight crime at street level. So when baseball czar J. Michael Storm asks Sidel to join him on the election’s Democratic ticket, the two wild men romp to an unprecedented landslide. But as the president-elect’s mandate goes off the rails—threatened by corruption, sex, and God knows what else—he tires of being overshadowed by Sidel, and dispatches him to a place from which tough politicians seldom return: Texas. In the Lone Star state, Sidel confronts rogue astrologers, accusations of pedophilia, and a dimwitted assassin who doesn’t know when to take an easy shot. If this Bronx bomber doesn’t watch his step, he risks making vice-presidential history by getting killed on the job.

Jerome Charyn, "one of the most important writers in American literature" (Michael Chabon), continues his exploration of American history through fiction with The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, hailed by prize-winning literary historian Brenda Wineapple as a "breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism." Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn removes the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, inner turmoil, and powerful sexuality. The novel, daringly written in first person, begins in the snow. It's 1848, and Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules. Inspired by her letters and poetry, Charyn goes on to capture the occasionally comic, always fevered, ultimately tragic story of her life-from defiant Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse.

The author of numerous books about New York celebrates the personalities and celebrities who made the city famous during the Jazz era, including Mae West, Fanny Brice, Irving Berlin, Legs Diamond, Scott Fitzgerald, Arnold Rothstein, and many others. Reprint.

Isaac Sidel, the ex-First Deputy of New York City, is at his lowest ebb. A wounded romantic, he now lives a lonely existence at a grimy hotel on West Forty-seventh street, lamenting the death of Blue Eyes Coen, his most favoured cop, and the waywardness of his daughter, Marilyn the Wild. Still blighted by the Guzmanns, the ruthless criminal family, and ravaged with bitterness and guilt, Isaac yet falls in love with Annie, a beguiling Irish prostitute with a dark secret. Secret Isaac trails our forlorn hero from New York's political halls to the depths of Dublin's Joycean underworld as, on her behalf, he pursues a terrible and exacting revenge.

Ping-pong, played around the world by over 250 million people, cast a hypnotic spell on Jerome Charyn's childhood imagination. Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins portrays the great pongistes and includes photos and interviews with table tennis legends Marty "The Needle" Reisman and Dick Miles. From ping-pong detente in China to the underground bars of New York City, Charyn details the sport's history while capturing the intellect, excitement, and anarchic spirit of ping-pong's golden age. This offbeat and entertaining chronicle of one of the world's quirkier Olympic sports is presented in a completely redesigned trade paper edition. "Table tennis can now add to its two certified American superstar players a certified American superstar chronicler -- The New York Times "Both an informed history and an intimate memoir...[Charyn's] book is a giddy delight and a sweet elegy." -- The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Carlos Maria Montalbán, karismaattinen vampyyri, pyörittää naisia yhtä suvereenisti kuin klubeja, New Yorkin koululaitosta ja kaupungin rahavirtojakin. Marian tytöt ovat tämän kummisedän taikapiiriin joutuneita katunaisia, varkaita, myyjättäriä, yksinhuoltajia, koululaisia ja yläluokan naisia, joita yhdistää ainoastaan lumotun lojaalisuus lumoajaa kohtaan. Isaac Sidel passittaa Montalbánin jäljille Manhattanin betonikuiluihin etsivä Caroll Brentin. Tässä sodassa heimojen rajoja on mahdoton hahmottaa ja Brent joutuu sotkeutumaan tilanteeseen useammalla tavalla kuin haluaisikaan.

Poliisimestari Isaac Sidel on nykypäivän urbaani romantikko, jonka sisuksia raastaa raivo New Yorkissa rehottavaa typerää väkivaltaa kohtaan. Sattumanvarainen kohtaaminen tapon tehneen pikkuvanhan orpopojan kanssa saa Sidelin palaamaan kotikaupunkiinsa vakaana aikomuksenaan kaivautua sosiopatologian juurille. Mutta pian hän huomaa olevansa sotajalalla niin mafiaperheiden, pormestarin, kardinaalin kuin FBI:nkin kanssa.

Yolanda's a convict, caught by the cops while her boyfriend was robbing a bank. Now all the Hell Sisters at Harrington Hills prison farm are in love with her. Their leader wants to "marry" her. Yolanda has to find a way out. She's been taking a philosophy course in jail from Melvin P. Sparks, a Cornell professor who talks to the female convicts once a week about ecology, in galoshes and a torn shirt. But it's only a disguise. He's actually a member of the Christian Commandos, a ragtag group of environmental rangers who aren't quite soldiers or spies. Yolanda happens to be the cousin of Ruben Falcone, king of the Medellín cartel. The rangers want to meet with Ruben, who's hiding in the jungles of Colombia, while a dozen agencies destroy the rain forest tracking him. Sparks helps Yolanda get out of jail, whisking her off to Mandellín to find her long lost cousin. And so begins a journey that takes Yolanda into a crazy, comic heart of darkness, where nothing is ever as it seems, where a druglord can be a minister of environment, where Yolanda dances in a hundred rumbeaderos with different tango kings--all of them marked for death--and where she's sucked into the current of a world she only half understands. Death of a Tango King is a sad, funny, and disturbing novel about the coming of a new century, where the distance between right and wrong is not only irregular, but also hard to find.

Cast in the form of a hilariously ribald parody of a literary quarterly, ?" The Tar Baby"?is a brilliant, audacious, story-filled novel populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies. A commemorative issue honoring the late Anatole Waxman-Weissman, the book/journal parodies a number of academic fads and concerns as the various contributors expose their and their subject's many idiosyncrasies while pursuing their own private agendas.

Han är ett hittebarn, funnen på en åker i Ukraina. Han får slåss för sin överlevnad. Tills en dag Sovjets KGB rekryterar honom och skickar honom till USA som agent. Där får han också kämpa för att överleva, fast mot svårare motståndare. En spännande spionthriller i hisnande bilder – men också en mytiskt symbolisk berättelse om storpolitiska konflikter och ideal. Fransmannen Boucq har skaffat sig hängivna fans med sina groteska skämtnoveller i tidningen Epix. Men han kan också teckna mer realistiskt, som i denna serieroman med manus av den amerikanske deckarförfattaren Jerome Charyn.