Jerome Charyn

Big Red - a Novel

What if the old maid of Amherst wasn't an old maid at all? The poet dons a hundred veils, alternately playing wounded lover, penitent, and female devil in this extraordinary adventure that will disturb and delight.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel

A narrative portrait of Abraham Lincoln in his own voice reflects on his major life events, from his picaresque youth in Illinois and improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd through his visit to war-shattered Richmond days before his assassination.

I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War

“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war—from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations. Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin. He lives in New York.

Sergeant Salinger

the last goddess

Discoveries, Marilyn

"A lyrical autobiography in essays from a celebrated author, honoring outlier artists and other heroes and villains who inspired him. In this collection of ten essays, Jerome Charyn takes readers on a tour through the New York of his youth and into the curious, probing mind of a great writer, crafting a love letter to the colorful places, people, and books--some famous, some forgotten--that have nourished him over his long and prolific literary career. Whether Charyn is writing about baseball or his relationship with his Jewish immigrant father, paying tribute to goddesses of the silver screen or the comic shops of the South Bronx, his writing sings beyond the silence intrinsic to the act of art making and the overwhelming passage of time"--

essays on silence and song

In the shadow of King Saul

François Boucq

New York cannibals

A Mulher do Mágico

A Novel

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

The climactic conclusion to the iconic Isaac Sidel mystery series, which finds Charyn’s acclaimed hero facing his toughest showdown yet, this time as commander-in-chief . . . Reflecting our own world like a volatile funhouse mirror, Winter Warning lures us back to the 1980s, an era that could have been ripped right out of our most recent political upheaval. Isaac Sidel should have been vice president, banished to some far corner of the West Wing, but the president-elect has been forced to resign or face indictment for his crooked land deals—and Sidel becomes the accidental president. He’s a maverick, a crusader with a Glock in his belt, who defies both the Republicans and the Democrats. He seems haunted by Lincoln’s ghost, and the presidential palace becomes his own “great white jail,” as it did for Harry Truman. There’s never been another president quite like Isaac Sidel, New York’s former police commissioner and mayor. There’s a secret lottery created by some bankers in Basel to determine the exact date of Sidel’s death. And Sidel has to outrun this lottery in order to save himself. His greatest allies are not the Secret Service or the DNC, but a former Israeli prime minister who was a explosives operative during the British occupation of Palestine . . . as well as a mysterious billionaire who belongs to a brotherhood of killers and counterfeiters. His only companions in the capital are the captain of his helicopter fleet and a sexy naval intelligence officer who realizes that something has gone amuck at Camp David, when a band of mercenaries arrive with their sights trained on Sidel.

Winter Warning

"Où t'en es-tu allé, Joe DiMaggio ? Une nation entière tourne vers toi son regard esseulé', interrogent Simon et Garfunkel dans la chanson culte "Mrs Robinson'. Homme élevé au rang de demi-dieu, acclamé par les foules, DiMaggio a été brisé par la machine qui a fait sa gloire. Mais qui était vraiment Joe "la Châtaigne', légende américaine du baseball, héros trop discret à la personnalité taciturne et époux malheureux de Marilyn Monroe ? Jerome Charyn donne ici voix à l'Amérique de l'après-guerre, qui a vu naître la culture de masse et l'âge d'or des icônes patronnées par les industries du sport et du cinéma. Il analyse les rouages du rêve américain à travers les portraits croisés de DiMaggio, fils d'immigrés italiens, et de Marilyn, aux origines sociales modestes, tous deux partis côtoyer les étoiles. Par petites touches, il en montre également les fêlures : la ségrégation, le maccarthysme, et l'émergence de la contre-culture. Mêlant travail de recherche, bonheur d'écriture et fulgurances littéraires, il s'affranchit de la frontière entre la biographie et le roman, s'inscrivant ainsi dans la lignée des grands textes de Norman Mailer et de Joyce Carol Oates. Préface inédite de l'auteur.

Joe DiMaggio. Portrait de l'artiste en joueur de baseball

The Magician's Wife

"Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer--so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible." --Tom Bissell Raising the literary bar to a new level, Jerome Charyn re-creates the voice of Theodore Roosevelt, the New York City police commissioner, Rough Rider, and soon- to-be twenty-sixth president through his derring-do adventures, effortlessly combining superhero dialogue with haunting pathos. Beginning with his sickly childhood and concluding with McKinley's assassination, the novel positions Roosevelt as a "perfect bull in a china shop," a fearless crime fighter and pioneering environmentalist who would grow up to be our greatest peacetime president. With an operatic cast, including "Bamie," his handicapped older sister; Eleanor, his gawky little niece; as well as the devoted Rough Riders, the novel memorably features the lovable mountain lion Josephine, who helped train Roosevelt for his "crowded hour," the charge up San Juan Hill. Lauded by Jonathan Lethem for his "polymorphous imagination and crack comic timing," Charyn has created a classic of historical fiction, confirming his place as "one of the most important writers in American literature" (Michael Chabon).

A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His Times

The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

Marilyn la dingue

“Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.” —Michael Chabon “[Charyn’s] sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” —Jonathan Lethem “One of our most rewarding novelists.” —Larry McMurtry On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him “Cesare” after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr’s enemies. Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin’s Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her. Cesare is a literary thriller and a love story born of the horrors of a country whose culture has died, whose history has been warped, and whose soul has disappeared. Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.

A Novel of War-Torn Berlin

Cesare

A madcap alternate-history account of the American Revolution finds young double agent John Stocking searching for clues about his mysterious birth while outmaneuvering a flamboyantly cunning George Washington and falling in love with Manhattan's most coveted harlot. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution

Hiding out in Riverside Park after lashing out at the boy who stole his girlfriend, Jack joins ranks with a group of vagrants and is soon under the sway of a man called the Leader, a charismatic ex-convict.

Back to Bataan

A startling novel of a celebrated author whose life was warped by war, shrouded in mystery, and broken by scandal

Jerzy

Los ojos azules del agente de policía Manfred Coen ven a diario cómo Nueva York se hunde en un negro pozo repleto de crimen, violencia y miseria. La desaparición de la joven Caroline Vander, hija de un millonario, no es más que otro episodio de la tragedia que asola a las familias distinguidas de la ciudad. En esta ocasión, sin embargo, el caso parece ir más allá, ya que Caroline no será la primera niña secuestrada que aparece tiempo después en México. Para llegar al fondo de la investigación e intentar salvar a la pequeña, Coen deberá regresar al Bronx de su infancia para sondear a antiguos vecinos y amigos que, muy a su pesar, quizá estén implicados en los secuestros. Fantasmas del pasado, traiciones y lealtades enfrentadas harán casi imposible la tarea de Coen, que ni siquiera sospecha que su propia vida corre peligro. Ojos azules (Serie Isaac Quartet, 1) es un retrato de la Nueva York más desconocida y una crónica de cómo los sabuesos del crimen organizado se mueven por sus angostos callejones como pez en el agua.

Ojos azules

Reflecting our own world like a volatile funhouse mirror, Winter Warning lures us back to the 1980s, an era that could have been ripped right out of our most recent political upheaval. Isaac Sidel should have been vice president, banished to some far corner of the West Wing, but the president-elect has been forced to resign or face indictment for his crooked land deals—and Sidel becomes the accidental president.There’s never been another president quite like Isaac Sidel, New York’s former police commissioner and mayor. There’s a secret lottery created by some bankers in Basel to determine the exact date of Sidel’s death. And Sidel has to outrun this lottery in order to save himself. His greatest allies are not the Secret Service or the DNC, but a former Israeli prime minister who was a explosives operative during the British occupation of Palestine . . . as well as a mysterious billionaire who belongs to a brotherhood of killers and counterfeiters. His only companions in the capital are the captain of his helicopter fleet and a sexy naval intelligence officer who realizes that something has gone amuck at Camp David, when a band of mercenaries arrive with their sights trained on Sidel.

Jerome Charyn

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