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A lyrical autobiography in essays from a celebrated author, honoring outlier artists and other heroes and villains who inspired him
In the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates expressed her admiration for an equally prolific contemporary: “Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy. . . . [He is] an exuberant chronicler of the mythos of American life”; the Los Angeles Times described him as “absolutely unique among American writers.” In these ten essays, Charyn shares personal stories about places steeped in history and myth, including his beloved New York, and larger-than-life personalities from the Bible and from the worlds of film, literature, politics, sports, and the author’s own family. Together, writes Charyn, these essays create “my own lyrical autobiography. Several of the selections are about other writers, some celebrated, some forgotten. . . . All of [whom] scalped me in some way, left their mark.”
Praise for In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song
“Accessible and brimming with erudition.” —Jewish Book Council
“[Charyn] is a writer of great passion, lyric and empathy. . . . These essays flow from the page with realism and from an author who knows the truth.” —North of Oxford
“Powerful. . . . Charyn composes an autobiography of essays, sharing lessons learned from a lifetime of love for leading ladies, literature and language.” —Shelf Awareness
“Lively. . . . A very personal view of the past artfully brought to vivid life.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Deeply personal. . . . Readers will delight in encountering Charyn’s New York City.” —Publishers Weekly
“A valuable collection, both an effective primer for readers new to Charyn’s work and an intriguing read for those already familiar, showing off his skills as a memoirist and a culture writer in equal measure.” —Foreword Reviews
“With his customary linguistic verve and pulsing imagination, Jerome Charyn serves up here some of the tastiest essay writing available. He knows and loves New York past and present, and he draws on a lifetime of raucous experience and dedicated reading for a rich, heady, satisfying brew.” —Phillip Lopate, editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and author of A Mother’s Tale
Select Praise for Jerome Charyn
“Jerome 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
“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
“Charyn has trained his prose and makes it perform tricks. It’s a New York prose, street smart, sly and full of lurches, like a series of subway stops on the way to hell.” —John Leonard, New York Times
“Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy―a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books
“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker
“Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words.” —Washington Post
“[Charyn’s] storytelling is off-the-chart wonderful.” —Jerusalem Post
“Absolutely unique among American writers.” —Los Angeles Times
“A contemporary American Balzac.” —Newsday
“[Charyn] writes with the sort of whirlwind energy that turns the seediest story into a breakneck adventure.” —Wall Street Journal
“Charyn has a gift for the unexpected, both linguistically and narratively. . . . The result is at once surprising and very entertaining.” —BookPage
“For half a century, [Charyn] has been an unpredictable, unclassifiable, and above all exactingly smart author.” —Open Letters Review
“Charyn, as he has proven time and time again, is a master of the written word.” —Jewish Journal
“Wherever he takes us, Charyn’s mind is always agile, and his prose is stunningly electric.” —Jewish Book Council
Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Maria La Divina; Ravage & Son; Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his work has been longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and PEN Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and selected as a finalist for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Culture at the American University of Paris, Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Manhattan.