Synopses & Reviews
Brooklyn is dead--long live the Bronx! Jerome Charyn returns to his roots and leads the literary renaissance of an often-overlooked borough in this surprising new collection. One of our most 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. In classic "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, ), Charyn recalls the mean streets of his youth. In "Lorelei" a lonely-hearts grifter returns home to a former sweetheart; in "Milo's Last Chance" a guidance counselor has a disastrous affair with a student; and in "The Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee gets entangled with a gang of drug dealers near the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought. In these and ten other stories, Charyn crafts a funny, sad, and loving tribute to the Bronx with his own masterly touch.
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"[Jerome Charyn] is to the Bronx what Saul Bellow, early in his career, was to Upper Broadway--bard, celebrant, mythologizer." Wall Street Journal
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"It is no small achievement to be the Babel of the Bronx." Washington Post
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"Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature." Leslie Epstein New York Times Book Review
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"Jerome Charyn is merely one of our finest writers, with a polymorphous imagination and crack comic timing. Whatever milieu he chooses to inhabit, his characters sizzle with life, and his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable." Michael Chabon
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"Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer--so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible." Jonathan Lethem
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"Jerome Charyn's Bronx is a landscape of magic and passion. With...American yearning and a stage full of unforgettable characters." Tom Bissell
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"Grifters, gangs, vamps, and lost souls pursue gritty lives in 'the brick wilderness of the Bronx' in this collection of tales by a veteran storyteller and native of the New York borough.... Charyn's staccato style is full of jolts, surprising observations, and turns of phrase. It works well with the rough struggle for survival and success...." BookPage
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"Sharp-edged short stories...Charyn's narrative sleight of hand is wonderfully at play.... Despite the hard edges, and there are many, a rich sweetness flows just below the surface of ." Jonathan Yardley Washington Post
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"A borough native wrestles with con men, gangsters and the biggest villain of all--Robert Moses.... One is left with no doubt that Jerome Charyn's shriek, his war cry, his own peculiar music, was born [in the Bronx]." Abraham Socher
Synopsis
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).
Throughout it all looms the "master builder" Robert Moses, a man who believed he could "save" the Bronx by building a highway through it, dynamiting whole neighborhoods in the process. Bitter Bronx stands as both a fictional eulogy for the people and places paved over by Moses' expressway and an affirmation of Charyn's "brilliant imagination" (Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune).
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Synopsis
Bronx native Jerome Charyn brings to life the pre- and post-Robert Moses world of New York's northernmost borough in these thirteen bittersweet stories.
Synopsis
Brooklyn is dead. Long live the Bronx! In , Jerome Charyn returns to his roots and leads the literary renaissance of an oft-overlooked borough in this surprising new collection.
About the Author
Jerome Charyn, a master of lyrical farce and literary ventriloquism, published his first novel in 1964 and is the author of Johnny One-Eye, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, I Am Abraham, and dozens of other acclaimed novels and nonfiction works. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Paris Review, American Scholar, Epoch, Narrative, Ellery Queen, and other magazines. Two of his memoirs have been named New York Times Book of the Year, and Michael Chabon has called him, "One of the most important writers in American literature." Charyn has also spent time as a professor and an international ranked table tennis player. He lives in New York and Paris.