In the Shadow of King Saul

March 12, 2018
Charyn (A Loaded Gun) presents a deeply personal look at the city, authors, and experiences that have shaped him and his writing. Readers will delight in encountering Charyn’s New York City, where “everything is possible because its past is only the future turned upside down,” beginning with the Dutch colonists who named it “New Amsterdam” to pretend they had never left home. From his ruminations on seeing classic studio-era films during his South Bronx childhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an account of a day spent with Mayor Ed Koch in the mid-’80s, Charyn’s prose enchants as he explores the modern individual as a sort of King Saul figure, out of favor with God. He draws a parallel between the biblical ruler, who “did not have the gift of song,” and his own father, a Polish immigrant ill at ease with English and America. Charyn views his own writing as “a mute’s revenge on a talkative world,” crediting Saul Bellow with inspiring not only him but many other Jewish writers to feel that they could join the American literary conversation. Longtime fans and those new to Charyn’s work alike will enjoy this distinctive glimpse into one author’s influences. Agent: Georges Borchardt, George Borchardt Inc.

June 15, 2018
Now entering his ninth decade, a prolific adventurer in fiction and nonfiction offers an amalgam of some of his favorite topics in 10 lively essays dating from 1978 through 2005.In an introductory essay, Charyn (Winter Warning: An Isaac Sidel Novel, 2017, etc.) confesses to a passion for words and a lust for books. That will be no surprise to his many devoted readers. During high school and college, he writes, "I was discovering a wonderland of books--it was like plunging deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole....I began to build my own castle of Modern Library classics, with one bookcase piled upon another." In the other essays, the author pays particular attention to the land of his birth, the Bronx, and its attendant mobsters. He remembers his family--a beautiful, troubled mother, an inattentive, illiterate father, a good police detective brother--mostly with affection. In his biblical exegesis, Charyn considers the feckless and fearful King Saul. Regarding literary matters, he expounds on the work of Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, the neglected Anzia Yezierska, and, most significantly, Isaac Babel. Charyn's world includes Josh Gibson, the gentle and disturbed hero of the Negro Baseball League, and Krazy Kat, the androgynous hero/heroine of the great eponymous comic strip. The author also explores the history of Ellis Island before it was cleaned up as well as the life of the natty gangster Arnold Rothstein. Charyn's New York is not E.B. White's. His collected ruminations, rendered in an idiosyncratic style that frequently combines street jargon with Talmudic intricacies, speak of greenhorns and gangsters, of alrightniks and no-goodniks, bosses, "mooks" and "geeps." His musings are populated by Babel's Benya Krik and Bellow's Augie March, and the leitmotif is the individual isolated in the world.A very personal view of the past artfully brought to vivid life.

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