Jerome Charyn

"A theater troupe dares to put on Shakespeare's King Lear, and shortly before the performance, the actor playing the title role falls ill. The prop manager, a lumbering, largely silent bear of a man - completely inappropriate for the part, according to common perception - finds himself literally thrust into the spotlight. His performance becomes the talk of Moscow, and he falls under the direct scrutiny of Joseph Stalin, who controls whether the show will proceed and the actors will live to give another performance. A winter's tale, an exploration of Shakespeare, the Soviet Union, and what it is to "perform.""--BOOK JACKET.

"What does an eleven-year-old boy do when his classmates call him "Dumbo" and his parents don't seem to knew that he exists? His mother, the beautiful Faigele, spends her days pushing her two-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 and 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 and dragged down a flight of stairs, where he 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 neighborhood poker game."--BOOK JACKET.

In the Babe Ruth era Babe Ragland, a gangly orphan from Baltimore, walks into a tryout for the Boston Red Sox, wins a spot as third-baseman, and becomes the league's seventh Babe. But as he rises to superstardom, Jerome Charyn gives the novel a magical turn that sets Babe in a new direction and transforms a conventional story line into something rich and wonderful. Upon discovering The Seventh Babe by chance or through the recommendations of friends, readers have devoted their energies to removing it from American literature's short list of best kept secrets. Place The Seventh Babe beside the sports fiction of Irwin Shaw, Mark Harris, Bernard Malamud, and W. P. Kinsella. It's one of the overlooked masterworks of the genre.

Cast in the form of a ribald parody of a literary quarterly--including such magazine paraphernalia as ads and letters to the editor--the novel is populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies.

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.

"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"--

Eleven-year-old Jack Dalton, a sensitive student at a private school in New York City in 1943, wants to go to Battan as a soldier just like his dead father, but instead he proves his bravery in an encounter with a mysterious hobo.