Narrated in Lincoln’s own voice, the tragicomic I Am Abraham promises to be the masterwork of Jerome Charyn’s remarkable career. Since publishing his first novel in 1964, Jerome Charyn has established himself as one of the most inventive and prolific literary chroniclers of the American landscape. Here in I Am Abraham , Charyn returns with an unforgettable portrait of Lincoln and the Civil War. Narrated boldly in the first person, I Am Abraham effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy, in the process creating an achingly human portrait of our sixteenth President. Tracing the historic arc of Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly young lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar Lincoln saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such as Mrs. Keckley—the former slave, who became the First Lady's dressmaker and confidante—and the swaggering and almost treasonous General McClellan with a parade of fictional extras: wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, speculators, scheming Senators, and even patriotic whores. We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who flanked the District in tattered uniforms and cardboard shoes, living in a no-man's-land between North and South; as well as the Northern deserters, young men all, with sunken, hollowed faces, sitting in the punishing sun, waiting for their rendezvous with the firing squad; and the black recruits, whom Lincoln’s own generals wanted to discard, but who play a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. At the center of this grand pageant is always Lincoln himself, clad in a green shawl, pacing the White House halls in the darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war. Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and 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.

"J.D. Salinger, the mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a litigious misanthrope who disowned his daughter. Jerome Charyn's Sergeant Salinger is a young 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 was bewitched by 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 and the ghosts of the murdered inside his head. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, this is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations"--

When Quentin Tarantino was eight years old, and all the regular kids were lining up to see the latest from Disney, Tarantino's mother took him to see Carnal Knowledge. Sound about right? A high-school dropout who never attended film school, Tarantino got all the education he needed while working the register at Los Angeles's fabled Video Archives. His enthusiasms — for pop culture (foreign and domestic), eye-popping aesthetics, and genre films — would become notorious and infectious. The outrageous success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction essentially killed off Tarantino the man, and gave birth to Tarantino the myth. Here, from legendary novelist and historian Jerome Charyn, is a portrait of both the man AND the myth — and the mind behind them both. More than a biography, more than a critical study, Raised by Wolves is a feisty and astute reckoning with Tarantino en toto.

"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."-- Page [4] of cover.

Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the Bronx has all the imagery and color of an enchanting and entertaining novel -- someone has said that it captures the author's world so accurately that it can't possibly be true. Bronx Boy , like The Dark Lady of Belorusse and The Black Swan , both selected by The New York Times as Notable Books of the Year, is a tour de force of memory and imagination. In this third and final installment, the higher truths of a masterly writer's art render moot the question of exactly where the real world ends and Charyn's imagined world begins. Still known as "Baby" although a younger brother has come along, young Charyn makes pocket money delivering eggs, belongs to a group of 12-year-old wannabe gangsters that meet in a soda shop run by an ex-con, and spends afternoons telling stories to the adoring wife of a wealthy Russian émigré. He becomes famous for his black-and-tans -- a concoction of coffee ice cream, seltzer, milk, chocolate sauce, crushed pecans -- and "a touch of bitterness that may have been the Bronx." So famous, indeed, that he walks away the winner of an annual black-and-tan contest sponsored by the real-life top gangster called "The Little Man" -- Meyer Lansky. In Charyn's hands, the often ridiculed Bronx is a magic place, as full of odd and wonderful characters as a three-ring circus. And at the center of it all, young "Baby," not as lucky in love as he would like to be, drinking it all in, putting his own extraordinary take on it. Charyn looks back at this with his singular vision, and records it all for us with the skill of the fine writer he is. This is a delightful and often moving story of a childhood that could only have been lived in New York in the fifties, a New York experience that could only have taken place in the Bronx of those days, a growing-up saga that could only have been captured by this singular author.

"Maria Callas, called La Divina, is widely recognized as the greatest diva who ever lived. Jerome Charyn's Callas springs to life as the headstrong, mercurial, and charismatic artist who captivated generations of fans, thrilling audiences with her brilliant performances and defiant personality. Unlike any other diva who achieved world renown, Callas came from an impoverished background. As an outsider, she was shunned by the Italian opera houses, but through sheer force of will and the power and range of her voice, she broke through the invisible wall to sing at La Scala and headline at the Metropolitan Opera, forging an unforgettable career. Adored by celebrities and statesmen, the notable and notorious alike, her every movement was shadowed by both music critics and gossip columnists-until, having lost her voice, she died alone in an opulent, mausoleum-like Paris apartment. In Charyn's inimitable style, Maria La Divina humanizes the celebrated diva, revealing the mythical artist as a woman who survived hunger, war, and loneliness to reach the heights of acclaim"--

The Isaac Quartet contains four detective stories from an internationally acclaimed master of the genre. Blue Eyes, the first book in Jerome Charyn’s legendary crime series, introduces Isaac Sidel — the toughest, most incorruptible police inspector in the biz. In Marilyn the Wild, Isaac confronts the hot-headed daughter of the first deputy police commissioner. The Education of Patrick Silver tells the story of a giant shoeless Irishman who becomes just another pawn in the war between Isaac and a gang of Peruvian pimps. And in Secret Isaac, a scar on a prostitute’s cheek sends Isaac on a desperate trip to Ireland in search of relief from the tightening grip on his soul. “Packed with manic energy, peopled with bizarre characters and outrageous situations. [Charyn] sounds like a ... Jewish Philip Marlowe.” — Chicago Sun-Times “These books constitute the highest kind of novelistic art ... absolutely unique among contemporary writers.” — Los Angeles Times

How to describe Faigele? A recent immigrant from Russia, the wife of an immigrant fur worker, a mother, a housewife, a greenhorn - and an enchantress of such striking beauty that she had the Bronx at her feet. The local postmaster consoled her with hot tea in his office every morning when she came with "Baby" Jerome, hoping for a letter from her brother in war-torn Russia. An admirer enlisted five-year-old Baby to help him produce a forged letter to ease her worry. But it was her dentist, a blackmarketer on the side, who introduced her to the circle of Bronx politicians who made her the dealer of their weekly poker game. Beautiful, passionate, worlds above words like "naive or sophisticated," Faigele has been blessed by her son, a rarely gifted writer who vividly recaptures this astonishing woman in her turbulent setting.

Using himself as the persona, the author interviews the police commissioner concerning racism and a SoHo dealer on art, invades Brooklyn Mafia dens and a Times Square sex palace, and explores a shelter for the homeless

In the 1980s, former New York City police commissioner and mayor Isaac Sidel becomes president of the United States after the former president resigns due to corruption, but Sidel must evade assassins sent by a shady cabal of Swiss bankers.

"In Bitter Bronx, one of our most gifted and original novelists depicts a world before and after modern urban renewal destroyed the gritty sanctity of a land made famous by Ruth, Gehrig, and Joltin' Joe. Bitter Bronx is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with Jerome Charyn's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a "land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders." In "Lorelei," a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in "Archy and Mehitabel" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in "Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories―"Silk & Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla"―Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, New York Times)".--Dust jacket.

In this comic novel of World War II, Jerome Charyn delights readers with a protagonist who is on the personal staff of General George Patton during the invasion of Germany. Captain Roland Kahn is the Old Man's court jester, his scribe, his philosophical companion. He keeps the General's dog Willie company when the animal's doting master isn't around, and tries to catch Margaret, the redheaded Red Cross girl, in a spare moment. But mostly, he is "hunting treasure", running a profitable scheme selling army supplies to various customers, with the assistance of his squad of MPs and with bitter competition from his rival merchandiser, the supply sergeant. Charyn's memorable characters and their shenanigans create a wonderful '40s movie feel and bring readers an authentic portrait of the larger-than-life Patton.

A Memoir"It was easy to invent a fable.When the letters did come from school, I'd scratch out a note in my father's hand, talk of fatigue, visits to the brain surgeon, etc.The East Bronx was like the Sahara, where a child and all his records could get lost in some infinite sand dune."What does an 11 year-old boy do when his classmates call him "Dumbo" and his parents don't seem to know that he exists?His mother, the beautiful Faigele spends her days pushing her 2 year-old son Marvin around in a stroller and barely hears Jerome's clarinet playing. The answer for Jerome Charyn is to go to the local movie house and hide out for a few hours every day.At the movies, he can escape, not be himself for a little while. One day, while watching Samson and Delilah for the seventh time that week, he is suddenly grabbed from his seat, dragged down a flight of stairs and winds up being introduced to a whole new way of life by three "cellar rats," as Jerome likes to call them.They make him a part of their group and he soon finds himself dressed in a Feuerman & Marx suit collecting money for Farouk, the local gangster. Many of the men remember his mother, The Dark Lady, from her days as dealer of their local poker game.With his distinctive style, a deep and accurate feeling for time and place, and an uncanny ability to communicate the world as seen through the imagination of an unusual boy, Charyn has created another gem of a memoir, a worthy sequel to The Dark Lady from Belorusse.

Book by Charyn, Jerome