Background
Charyn, Jerome was born on May 13, 1937 in New York City. Son of Sam Charyn and Fannie Paley.
( Ping-pong, played around the world by over 250 million ...)
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
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568582420/?tag=2022091-20
( Yolanda's a convict, caught by the cops while her boyfr...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814715753/?tag=2022091-20
( "A rollicking tale."―Stacy Schiff, New York Times Book ...)
"A rollicking tale."―Stacy Schiff, New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice Johnny One-Eye is bringing about the rediscovery of one of the most "singular and remarkable careers in American literature" (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World). In this picaresque tour de force that reanimates Revolutionary Manhattan through the story of double agent John Stocking, the bastard son of a whorehouse madam and possibly George Washington, Jerome Charyn has given us one of the most memorable historical novels in years. As Johnny seeks to unlock the mystery of his birth and grapples with his allegiances, he falls in love with Clara, a gorgeous, green-eyed octoroon, the most coveted harlot of Gertrude's house. The wild parade of characters he encounters includes Benedict Arnold, the Howe brothers, "Sir Billy" and "Black Dick," and a manipulative Alexander Hamilton.Not since John Barth's The Sotweed Factor and Gore Vidal's Burr has a novel so dramatically re-created America's historical beginnings. Reading group guide included.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393064972/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011MAXY1S/?tag=2022091-20
( As the New York Yankees' star centerfielder from 1936 t...)
As the New York Yankees' star centerfielder from 1936 to 1951, Joe DiMaggio is enshrined in America's memory as the epitome in sports of grace, dignity, and that ineffable quality called "class." But his career after retirement, starting with his nine-month marriage to Marilyn Monroe, was far less auspicious. Writers like Gay Talese and Richard Ben Cramer have painted the private DiMaggio as cruel or self-centered. Now, Jerome Charyn restores the image of this American icon, looking at DiMaggio's life in a more sympathetic light. DiMaggio was a man of extremes, superbly talented on the field but privately insecure, passive, and dysfunctional. He never understood that for Monroe, on her own complex and tragic journey, marriage was a career move; he remained passionately committed to her throughout his life. He allowed himself to be turned into a sports memorabilia money machine. In the end, unable to define any role for himself other than "Greatest Living Ballplayer," he became trapped in "a horrible kind of minutia." But where others have seen little that was human behind that minutia, Charyn in Joe DiMaggio presents the tragedy of one of American sports' greatest figures.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300123280/?tag=2022091-20
(238pages. poche. Broché.)
238pages. poche. Broché.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/2743629223/?tag=2022091-20
( In this heady tribute to an unforgettable time and plac...)
In this heady tribute to an unforgettable time and place, Jerome Charyn takes readers back to the golden era when Broadway the street became Broadway the legend. While Damon Runyon was the street's first chronicler, feting its good-guy gangsters and moxie'd molls, Charyn enlarges the story, capturing Broadway's vagabond nature, outlaw culture, and self-mythologizing. In prose both bombastic and cinematic, one of New York's quintessential contemporary writers brings a rollicking, rough-and-tumble time in the city's history to life, conjuring an intoxicating portrait of Jazz Age excess by examining the denizens of that greatest of all "staggering machines of desire," Broadway. The stellar cast in this popular history includes Mae West, Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond, Irving Berlin, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and many more. 30 historic black-and-white photographs are featured.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568582781/?tag=2022091-20
(Hailed as the first great Soviet writer, Isaac Babel was ...)
Hailed as the first great Soviet writer, Isaac Babel was at once a product and a victim of violent revolution. In tales of Cossack marauders and flashy Odessa gangsters, he perfectly captured the raw, edgy mood of the first years of the Russian Revolution. Masked, reckless, impassioned, charismatic, Babel himself was as fascinating as the characters he created. At last, in renowned author Jerome Charyn, Babel has a portraitist worthy of his quicksilver genius. Though it traces the arc of Babel’s charmed life and mysterious death, Savage Shorthand bursts the confines of straight biography to become a meditation on the pleasures, torments, and meanings of Babel’s art. Even in childhood, Babel seemed destined to leave a mark. But it was only when his mentor, Maxim Gorky, ordered him to go out into the world of revolutionary Russia that Babel found his true voice and subject. His tales of the bandit king Benya Krik and the brutal raids of the Red Cavalry electrified Moscow. Overnight, Babel was a celebrity, with throngs of admirers and a train of lovers. But with the rise of Stalin, Babel became a living ghost. Charyn brilliantly evokes the paranoid shadowland of the first wave of Stalin’s terror, when agents of the Cheka snuffed out artists like candle flames. Charyn’s chilling account of the circumstances of Babel’s death–hidden and lied about for decades by Stalin’s agents–finally sets the record straight. For Jerome Charyn, Babel is the writer who epitomizes the vibrancy, violence, and tragedy of literature in the twentieth century. In Savage Shorthand, Charyn has turned his own lifelong obsession with Babel into a dazzling and original literary work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679643060/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058PYUH6/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B012HTGUYG/?tag=2022091-20
( Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312278101/?tag=2022091-20
(Jocko Robinson is the 97th richest man in America and the...)
Jocko Robinson is the 97th richest man in America and the creator of Lamplighter, the world-popular TV crime series. But that doesn't stop Jocko from getting shot in the head while looking for a tofu burger in Los Angeles. And that won't stop Jocko from falling helplessly in love with the Hurricane Lady, a former model who calls herself Inertia and serves a crime lord from Cologne. A man obsessed among other obsessed men, a man in love among a tangle of lovers, Jocko is desperately trying to pry away Inertia from her life of mayhem and promiscuity. To succeed, Jocko has to enter the realm of his own fantasy-and somehow find a way out again.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446677337/?tag=2022091-20
( "In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, ...)
"In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination."―Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review 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. 9 black-and-white illustrations
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393339173/?tag=2022091-20
(First Edition)
First Edition
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YZMKAJ0/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/2070763862/?tag=2022091-20
(In this rousing tribute to an unforgettable time and plac...)
In this rousing tribute to an unforgettable time and place, Jerome Charyn picks up where Gangs of New York left off and transports readers back to a swaggering, golden era in American life--the Roaring Twenties--when Broadway the street exploded into Broadway the legend. Charyn looks at the men and women who helped make the Big Street the most glamorous place on the planet, from Mae West to Fanny
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FDVAIH6/?tag=2022091-20
(In his nine previous Isaac Sidel novels Jerome Charyn has...)
In his nine previous Isaac Sidel novels Jerome Charyn has deconstructed New York City and put it back together again in a brilliant, garish, cubist panorama-where the mayor wears a gun in his pants and duels with bad guys in the streets, where Ping-Pong players make perfect hit men and the phantom of a Roumanian beauty hovers like a Chagall angel over the proceedings. Hailed by critics as the most innovative and daring crime writer of his generation, Jerome Charyn returns with the latest installment of his never-less-than-astounding series. The Big Guy is running for the White House. Or rather, his self-aggrandizing sometimes partner baseball czar J. Michael Storm is running for president, and taking the mayor of New York along-not for the ride, but for the muscle. Isaac is all muscle. While the Dems throng at the Garden and the pundits watch the polls, the mayor is hitting the streets, investigating a murder and a little fiefdom of corruption. The killing was by a father of his son. Both were cops. The evidence leads Isaac to the oh-four on Elizabeth Street and its captain, who dares the mayor to keep pressing, and then dares to send shotgun-wielding cops to throw a scare into the Citizen. The Citizen doesn't scare. Obsessed with the notion that one of his precincts is breeding corruption and murder-and is being protected by someone in national power-the man who would be Veep goes on a campaign and a crusade. What Isaac finds out is how hard his enemies are willing to strike back at him, how high up they really go, and, while the living make their plans for glory, how the dead can come back to life on the violent streets of New York.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/089296605X/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031216808X/?tag=2022091-20
Charyn, Jerome was born on May 13, 1937 in New York City. Son of Sam Charyn and Fannie Paley.
Bachelor, Columbia College, 1959.
Lecturer creative writing Princeton University, New Jersey, 1981-1986. Visiting district professor City University New York, New York City, 1988-1989. Professor film studies American University Paris, France, 1995—2009, Distinguished professor film studies, 2005—2009, co-chair department film studies, 2006—2008.
(In his nine previous Isaac Sidel novels Jerome Charyn has...)
(In this rousing tribute to an unforgettable time and plac...)
( Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the...)
( As the New York Yankees' star centerfielder from 1936 t...)
( In this heady tribute to an unforgettable time and plac...)
( Ping-pong, played around the world by over 250 million ...)
( "In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, ...)
(Jocko Robinson is the 97th richest man in America and the...)
(Hailed as the first great Soviet writer, Isaac Babel was ...)
( Yolanda's a convict, caught by the cops while her boyfr...)
( "A rollicking tale."―Stacy Schiff, New York Times Book ...)
(First Edition)
(238pages. poche. Broché.)
