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A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early Manhattan, Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan's Lower East Side — the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century — in a dark mirror. Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish'Mr. Hyde', a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.

A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century ManhattanRavage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan's Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror.Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish “Mr. Hyde,” a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.

Narrated by a starry-eyed reporter, Big Red reimagines the tragic career of Rita Hayworth and her indomitable husband, Orson Welles. Set amidst the noir glamour of Hollywood's Golden Age, Big Red reenvisions the life of one of America's most enduring icons: Gilda herself, Rita Hayworth, whose fiery red hair and hypnotic dancing helped make her the quintessential movie star of the 1940s. With narrator Rusty Redburn - a feisty second-string gossip columnist from Kalamazoo tasked with spying on Hayworth by Columbia movie mogul Harry'The Janitor'Cohn - as our guide, we follow the meteoric rise and heartrending demise of the actress, encountering her exploitative father, Eduardo; her controlling husband,'boy genius'Orson Welles; and notorious journalist Louella Parsons, among many others. Mixing his trademark screwball comedy and unerring tragedy, Jerome Charyn, with his'polymorphous imagination'(Jonathan Lethem) reanimates film classics such as Cover Girl, Gilda, and The Lady from Shanghai. An insightful, tender portrait of a seemingly halcyon age before blockbusters and film franchises, Big Red promises to consume both Hollywood cinephiles and neophytes alike.

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war - from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a'spook,'with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him'Cesare'after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr's enemies. Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin's Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her.

A spy navigates the labyrinthine horrors of Nazi Germany, on a mission to save the woman he loves“Charyn's blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words.... [Cesare is] provocative, stimulating and deeply satisfying.” —Washington PostOn a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him “Cesare” after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr's enemies.Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin's Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her.Cesare is a literary thriller and a love story born of the horrors of a country whose culture has died, whose history has been warped, and whose soul has disappeared.Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.

In seinem früheren Leben war Patrick Silver einmal Cop. Und Kollege von Isaac Sidel. Jetzt ist der jüdisch-irische Koloss hauptberuflich Synagogenwächter und hoffnungsloser Guinnesssäufer. Sein Leben nimmt eine jähe Wende, als er als Aufpasser für das grauhaarige Baby Jerónimo Guzmann angeheuert wird, die absonderlichste Ausgeburt der Guzmann'schen Gangstersippschaft. Den verdächtigt Isaac Sidel, der »Lippenstiftmörder« zu sein, der kleinen Jungen erst die Gesichter anmalt, bevor er sie umbringt. Da bietet sich eine Reunion mit Patrick Silver geradezu an.

Joe Barbarossa ist ein Cop der etwas anderen Sorte: Aus dem Hinterzimmer eines Tischtennisclubs operiert er undercover und wickelt nebenher eigene Drogendeals ab. Genau der richtige Mann für Isaac Sidel, Chef der New Yorker Polizei und Spitzenkandidat wider Willen für den Posten des New Yorker Bürgermeisters. Isaac müsste längst auf Wahlkampftour sein, doch er hat noch ein Hühnchen mit der Mafia zu rupfen. Mit der Glock in der Hand und Strumpfmaske über dem Kopf geht Sidel zusammen mit Barbarossa auf nicht ganz legalen Raubzug in den Mafia-Lokalen New Yorks – und stößt dabei immer wieder auf mysteriöse sizilianische Holzpuppen, die nicht nur die Mafia, sondern auch das FBI interessieren. Unterdessen verfällt Joe Isaacs Tochter, Marilyn the Wild, und Isaac jagt immer noch seiner alten Geliebten Margaret Tolstoi nach: von Manhattan über die Bronx bis nach Palermo.

Isaac Sidel, Bürgermeister New Yorks und ehemaliger Polizeichef, spielt jetzt in der ganz großen Politik mit. Die Demokraten haben ihn zum Vizepräsidentschaftskandidaten gekürt, um dem glücklosen Strahlemann J. Michael Storm einen Volkshelden zur Seite zu stellen. Die legendäre Glock inklusive. Dabei stimmt in New York gar nichts mehr. Die halbe Bronx und ganze Straßenzüge Manhattans liegen in Schutt und Asche. Ein tödlich endender Vater-Sohn-Konflikt in der NYPD weckt in Isaac alte Jagdinstinkte – was seine Feinde außerordentlich nervös macht. Irgendjemand will ihn tot sehen, so viel ist klar: gierige Geschäftsleute, ein korrupter Polizeiapparat, ruchlose Republikaner, vielleicht auch das FBI. Isaacs letzte Verbündete sind eine Zwölfjährige mit begnadeten Fähigkeiten im Keksebacken und eine tollkühne Ratte…

Isaac Sidel ist zwar Polizeichef von New York, doch immer noch am liebsten auf der Straße unterwegs. In seinem Kampf gegen ein verwahrlostes Schulsystem bekommt er es mit einem mächtigen Gegenspieler zu tun. Schulbeauftragter Carlos María Montalban veruntreut Bildungsgelder, macht aus Schulen Drogenumschlagsplätze und paktiert mit der Mafia. Um ihm das Handwerk zu legen, heuert Isaac seinen ersten Partner seit der Ermordung von »Blue Eyes« Coen an. Detective Caroll Brent soll an New Yorks Schulen patrouillieren und verdeckt gegen María ermitteln. Dabei ahnt Isaac nicht, wie sehr sein neuer Partner zwischen allen Fronten steht. Bald wird klar, dass Isaac Sidel mit seiner Mission an Mächtigen und Machenschaften rüttelt, die ihn das Leben kosten könnten.

Mit einem Erdrutschsieg ist Isaac Sidel zum Bürgermeister von New York City gewählt worden. Bevor er endgültig sein Amt antritt, heißt es, eine mysteriöse White-Power-Bande dingfest zu machen, die Obdachlose tötet. Dazu wirft Sidel sich wieder einmal in Lumpen und verschwindet unter dem Decknamen Geronimo Jones in den Untergrund von Manhattan North. Bald kommt er einer mordenden Gang auf die Spur, die in die unappetitlichsten New Yorker Polittricksereien verstrickt ist und deren Macht vom Ali-Baba-Sexpalast am Times Square bis ins Alte Europa reicht: nach Paris, Rumänien und ins Odessa der vierziger Jahre. Dort warten nicht nur Erinnerungen an eine alte Liebschaft auf Isaac Sidel, sondern diese Liebschaft, Margaret Tolstoi, selbst, die ihren ganz eigenen, gefährlichen Plan verfolgt…

Drogen, Waffengewalt, rivalisierende Gangs, korrupte Cops, ausgebrannte Straßenzüge: Die Bronx ist ein hartes Pflaster, das ständig am Rand eines kollektiven Gewaltausbruchs steht. Allein Baseball und das Yankee Stadium halten den Stadtteil am Leben. Nun droht ein Streik der Spieler den gesamten Borough in den Untergang zu stürzen. Ein letzter Hoffnungsträger scheint der zwölfjährige Aljoscha zu sein: ein Graffiti-Künstler, der die Häuserwände der Bronx mit den Heldentaten und Porträts gefallener Gangster schmückt. Als Aljoscha eines Tages zwischen die Fronten gerät und verschwindet, ahnt Isaac Sidel Böses. Inmitten eskalierender Gewalt ist es für den Bürgermeister New Yorks wieder einmal Zeit, in die kriminellen Schattenwelten seiner Stadt einzutauchen…

Manfred »Blue Eyes« Coen ist blauäugiger Frauenmagnet und leidenschaftlicher Ping-Pong-Spieler. Als jüdischer Cop in Manhattan war er die rechte Hand eines knallharten Chiefs: Isaac Sidel. Doch der ist in Ungnade gefallen und hält Winterschlaf in der Bronx. Und Coen ist als Isaacs Maulwurf auf den Spuren eines peruanischen Zuhälterrings auf sich allein gestellt. Weitere Zutaten: eine männermordende Schönheit, ein tödlich beleidigter Chinese mit roter Perücke, alte Bekannte, ungeklärte Familiengeheimnisse – und das Unheil nimmt seinen Lauf.

Isaac Sidel, mittlerweile First Deputy in einem von Machenschaften beherrschten Präsidium, hält wieder einmal Winterschlaf. Geplagt von seinem Bandwurm, hat er sich in ein heruntergekommenes Hurenhaus verkrochen, um direkter am Geschehen zu sein (und in Ruhe seinen Launen nachhängen zu können). Auf einem seiner Streifzüge trifft er Annie Powell, eine blutjunge Prostituierte, dem Alkohol verfallen und gebrandmarkt mit einem in die Wange geritzten D. Dieses grausame Zeichen lässt Isaac keine Ruhe. Seine Suche bringt ihn, den Joyce-Fan, bis nach Dublin, wo er einem irischen Zuhälterring auf die Spur kommt, dessen Netzwerk bis in die obersten Ränge der New Yorker Polizei reicht.

Isaac Sidel steigt höher in der Rangordnung: Als bekanntester Polizeichef des Landes wird er vom Justizministerium auf Promotion-Tour durchs Land geschickt. Der politischen Selbstvermarktung überdrüssig, bricht er die Tour ab und kehrt nach New York zurück. Doch seine Alleingänge drohen ihm zum Verhängnis zu werden: ein gefährliches Netz schließt sich um ihn, in dem rivalisierende Mafia-Familien und das FBI genauso vertreten sind wie Isaacs eigener Geheimdienst, das irische Urgestein Kardinal Jim, Bürgermeisterin Becky Karp und ein elitärer Club, dessen Vorlieben um Baseballhistorie und Kriminalität kreisen. Und da ist noch die geheimnisvolle Margaret Tolstoi, seine nie vergessene Jugendliebe, die jetzt in Lebensgefahr schwebt – oder ist alles ganz anders?

Todfeinde hatte Isaac Sidel schon immer, aber diesmal ist alles anders. Jetzt ist er da, wo er nie hinwollte: im Weißen Haus, als Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten. Den Law-and-Order-Mann von der Lower East Side hatte keiner auf der Rechnung, und als Neuling verfängt er sich prompt im Netz der Macht. Er kann keinen Schritt mehr ohne den Secret Service und seinen Adjutanten mit dem Atomkoffer tun. Seine Glock ist nur noch Requisit – und seine Partei würde ihn lieber heute als morgen absägen. Bald zeigt sich, Isaacs Leben ist in höchster Gefahr. Doch wer betreibt seinen Tod und warum? Die Washingtoner Elite, ­Gangstersyndikate, Spätkommunisten, die Finanzwelt? Unaufhaltsam dreht sich die Spirale einer weltumspannenden Verschwörung. Und Präsident Sidel ist die Spielfigur einer aberwitzigen Lotterie um Leben und Tod.

'Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.'—Michael Chabon'Whatever milieu [Charyn] chooses to inhabit... his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.'—Jonathan Lethem'With his customary linguistic verve and pulsing imagination, 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 LopateIn 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.'Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, Charyn has been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Isaac Sidel, Deputy Chief Inspector mit unorthodoxen Methoden, herrscht über das härteste Pflaster New Yorks wie ein Patriarch. Babyhuren, marodierende Jugendgangs, Intrigen im Polizeiapparat sind sein Alltag. Aber was er nicht zu bändigen weiß, ist seine eigene Tochter, Marilyn the Wild. Mit 25 dreimal geschieden, ist sie neuerdings Manfred Coen verfallen, Isaacs Ziehsohn und Partner. Was die Balance zwischen Isaac und Coen gehörig in Schieflage bringt. Zugleich brodelt es in Isaacs Stammrevier, der jüdisch-puertoricanisch-chinesisch-italienisch geprägten Lower East Side. Eine auf Rache sinnende Jugendbande hat es auf Marilyn abgesehen. Für Isaac Sidel wie für »Blue Eyes« Coen steht viel auf dem Spiel.

Reflecting our own world like a volatile funhouse mirror, Winter Warning lures us back to the 1980s, an era that could have been ripped right out of our most recent political upheaval. Isaac Sidel should have been vice president, banished to some far corner of the West Wing, but the president-elect has been forced to resign or face indictment for his crooked land deals—and Sidel becomes the accidental president.There's never been another president quite like Isaac Sidel, New York's former police commissioner and mayor. There's a secret lottery created by some bankers in Basel to determine the exact date of Sidel's death. And Sidel has to outrun this lottery in order to save himself. His greatest allies are not the Secret Service or the DNC, but a former Israeli prime minister who was a explosives operative during the British occupation of Palestine... as well as a mysterious billionaire who belongs to a brotherhood of killers and counterfeiters. His only companions in the capital are the captain of his helicopter fleet and a sexy naval intelligence officer who realizes that something has gone amuck at Camp David, when a band of mercenaries arrive with their sights trained on Sidel.

Before Isaac Sidel adopts him, Manfred Coen is a mutt. A kid from the Bronx, he joins the police academy after his father's suicide leaves him directionless, and is trudging along like any other cadet when first deputy Sidel, the commissioner's right hand man, comes looking for a young cop with blue eyes to infiltrate a ring of Polish smugglers. He chooses Coen, and asks the cadet to join his department after he finishes the academy. Working under Sidel means fast promotions, plush assignments, and, when a corruption scandal topples his mentor, the resentment of every rank-and-file detective on the force. Now just an ordinary cop, Coen hears word that his old mentor has a line on a human trafficking operation. When Sidel's attempt at infiltration fails, he sends in Coen. For Coen, it's a shot to prove himself and redeem his mentor, but it could cost the blue-eyed cop his life.

The ragged old man has a tapeworm in his gut and a room at a nameless Whore's Row hotel, but to those in the know, he is one of the most powerful people in New York. Once the first deputy of the police commissioner, Isaac Sidel has lived in impoverished exile ever since the death of his detective protégé, Manfred Coen. As he wanders the streets around Times Square, Sidel spies a prostitute with a fearsome scar: a letter D seared into her cheek. His pity stirred, he asks her name and buys her a meal. Afterwards, he sets out to destroy the man who branded her. Sidel's target is a pimp with a love for James Joyce and a hand in the pocket of the police commissioner. Taking him down will mean upending the force that Sidel once served, but if the tapeworm doesn't stop him, no crook can.

After he stops killing for money, Sidney Holden tries to live discreetly. He takes a Manhattan apartment in the Copenhagen building, a few blocks from where John Lennon died, and attempts to make a new life with his fiancee, Fay, former daughter-in-law of the district attorney. But as the quiet months pass, Fay grows distant and suicidal, and finally disappears, removed by the district attorney to a mental hospital where Holden cannot reach her. Hungry for a last taste of action, a billionaire ex-gangster named Phipps offers to help Holden get her back. The ninety-two-year-old Phipps hires Holden to run a counterfeiting scheme, using Fay's whereabouts as bait. But the closer Holden gets to Phipps'operation, the less he trusts the old man. And with the DA and the mafia closing on him, Holden may not stay alive long enough to rescue his darling from her prison.

For Detective Caroll Brent, special attention from Commissioner Sidel is not a good thing. Sidel's last pet detective, Manfred Coen, was killed by a gang of smugglers, and none of Sidel's favorites have had good luck since. But when Sidel taps Brent for an unusual assignment, the young cop can't refuse. As part of a feud with the head of the Board of Education, Sidel turns Brent into a one-man special task force to patrol the city's schools. The lonely, miserable, dangerous work is not Brent's only trouble. Ever since he made the mistake of marrying an heiress, he has been spending like mad to keep up with her lifestyle, borrowing money from the mob to keep himself in tuxedos on a detective's salary. When his money runs out, it's Sidel who will have to cover the debt.

Isaac Sidel is a bear of a cop. Although his position as the commissioner's first deputy is largely political, Sidel has not forgotten how to work the New York City streets. To protect the East Side he has survived gunfights, broken arms, and once tore out a hoodlum's eyes. In his spare time he does favors for old friends, finding runaway daughters and protecting merchants from roving street gangs. On the street there is no problem he can't solve, but at home he is powerless. His daughter Marilyn, twenty-five and twice divorced, keeps Sidel up at night. Just before her father goes to Paris for a lecture on police work, Marilyn runs away from her newest husband and shacks up with Manfred Coen, Sidel's blue-eyed protégé cop. Both men love her, and when Marilyn becomes a target, they'll destroy the city to save her, if they don't kill each other first.

Though incorruptible – at least by New York Police Department standards – Detective Isaac Sidel knows that sometimes it's useful to look a little dirty. To gain access to the Bronx-based Guzmann crime syndicate, rumored to be building a human trafficking operation in Spanish Harlem, Sidel had himself kicked off the force on a corruption charge. With the help of Manfred Coen, a young cop whom Sidel once mentored, he posed as a desperate, dirty cop in hopes of infiltrating the Guzmann family. The gamble got Coen killed, and left Sidel with nothing but guilt, bruises, and a tapeworm. Now the detective craves revenge. To break down the syndicate, he targets Patrick Silver, the Guinness-addicted handler of forty-four-year-old man-child Jeronimo Guzmann. When a crush on Odile, porn queen of the Bronx, confuses Patrick's loyalty, the family begins to tear itself apart. It's up to Isaac Sidel to make sure they don't take the city with them.

For the first time in his adult life, Isaac Sidel is no longer a cop. He has moved beyond the halls of One Police Plaza, and is about to take residence in Gracie Mansion, after winning New York's mayoral election in a landslide. Unable to bear his downtown apartment without his girlfriend-who is in Europe confronting her Nazi-tinged past – the increasingly paranoid mayor-elect has set up shop in a homeless shelter under the name Geronimo Jones. His aides roust him from his hiding spot and have returned him to work when he gets a call from the shelter: Geronimo Jones is dead. A gang of white supremacists roams the city, murdering shelter residents and marking them with Sidel's alias. They leave notes with each victim, signing them with the names of nineteenth-century baseball players. Mayors don't go armed, but Sidel isn't the mayor yet. He and his Glock will settle this problem before he takes his oath of office.

Joey Barbarossa likes being a cop, because it makes dealing drugs easier. Any time a fellow pusher gives him trouble, Joey's detective badge and police-issue Glock have a way of making the problem disappear. He's also protected by his mentor, NYPD Commissioner Isaac Sidel, but there's nothing even Sidel can do when Barbarossa makes the mistake of rubbing out a dealer with ties to the Justice Department. For compensation, Justice demands Barbarossa start spying on Sidel, who's just made him his personal chauffer. The drug-dealing detective can't say no. Sidel is preparing for a run at the mayor's office, but before his campaign kicks off he has to deal with two mob bosses who want him dead. He and Barbarossa don ski masks and start holding up mafia establishments, but as the pressure rises and the friendship frays, the only question is which cop will turn on the other first.

In his years serving the people of New York, Isaac Sidel has often rescued the city from oblivion, but never has he faced anything as dangerous as the current baseball strike. The South Bronx, a wasteland of drugs, murder, and urban blight, is kept from sliding into utter chaos by Yankee Stadium's steady stream of tourists. Every week that the strike continues and the fans stay away, the Bronx slips closer to the edge. As the crime rate spikes, a lone bright spot remains. Alyosha, a mysterious twelve-year-old graffiti artist, paints dramatic murals to commemorate the dead. When Alyosha befriends the daughter of the lawyer representing the player's union, Sidel sees a possible solution to the Bronx's woes. But there is too much money in baseball for the strike to be settled peacefully. Before the season starts, more blood will stain the sidewalks of El Bronx.

Tired of being led by weaklings, the American people have fallen in love with J. Michael Storm and Isaac Sidel, the lawyer and the New York mayor who saved the country from the worst baseball strike in history. The Democratic National Convention is at Madison Square Garden, and when Storm is nominated for the presidency, he's going to put the eccentric, gun-toting Sidel at the bottom of the ticket. But before Sidel can take his shot at the White House, he has a few loose ends to tie up. He's most preoccupied with a father-and-son detective team suspected of running a murder-for-hire operation that went south, resulting in the father shooting his son. Sidel suspects there's more to the story, and until he's gotten to the bottom of it, the vice presidency will have to wait.

When he was the police commissioner's first deputy, Isaac Sidel was one of the most powerful men in New York. But now that he's been promoted to the top job, there's nothing for Sidel to do but stare at his desk and feed the tapeworm that's attached to his stomach. The Justice Department sends him on a lecture tour of the country, but after one too many lunches with small-town mayors, Sidel goes AWOL and comes back to New York, getting in touch with the Ivanhoes, his illegal network of secret informants. A missing mob lawyer, a baseball-obsessed orphan genius, and a mysterious Romanian princess point towards a mystery that only he can tackle. Justice wants him back on tour, but something is rumbling beneath the city, and Sidel needs to be there to see it explode.

Though he doesn't know mink from sable, Sidney Holden is the most important employee at Aladdin Furs. He is a bumper, a well-dressed killer who collects the debts that cannot be paid, and Aladdin would be nothing without him. After all, fur is murder. As Cuban refugees flood the United States, the New York criminal class is rocked by the appearance of a Santería sect that hails a young girl as the newest incarnation of Changó, their bloodthirsty thunder god. But after a routine hit, Holden finds the girl cowering under the kitchen table – a divine witness to a double murder. Unable to kill her, he takes her with him, sparking an all-out turf war so vicious that Holden will be happy to have any god on his side.

'A moving attempt to trace the connections between Kosinski's wartime struggles and postwar fictions.'—New Yorker'Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that's still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it.... [He] show[s] that all forms of power are pretty much alike, or at least connected—Hollywood, Capitol Hill, Kensington Palace, the Kremlin. Because Kosinski is a figure who proves (if we still need to learn it) that the craziness of American life may have more in common with the craziness of Russia and Europe than we like to think.'—New York Times Book Review (Editors'Choice)Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works.Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators—a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin's daughter—who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski's personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity.Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel.

PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography LonglistO, The Oprah Magazine “Best Books of Summer” selection“Magnetic nonfiction.” —O, The Oprah Magazine“Remarkable insight... [a] unique meditation/investigation.... Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these.” —Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wild Nights! and The Lost LandscapeWe think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote:My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—…Though I than He— may longer liveHe longer must—than I—For I have but the power to kill,Without—the power to die—Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today.Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. He lives in New York.

After decades of madness in the Bronx, Isaac Sidel visits the craziest state in the country. Isaac Sidel is too popular to be America's vice president. Once the New York Police Department commissioner, he became the most beloved mayor in the city's history -- famous for his refusal to surrender his Glock, and for his habit of disappearing for months at a time to fight crime at street level. So when baseball czar J. Michael Storm asks Sidel to join him on the election's Democratic ticket, the two wild men romp to an unprecedented landslide. But as the president-elect's mandate goes off the rails -- threatened by corruption, sex, and God knows what else -- he tires of being overshadowed by Sidel, and dispatches him to a place from which tough politicians seldom return: Texas. In the Lone Star state, Sidel confronts rogue astrologers, accusations of pedophilia, and a dimwitted assassin who doesn't know when to take an easy shot. If this Bronx bomber doesn't watch his step, he risks making vice-presidential history by getting killed on the job.

Good news: Isaac Sidel ist wieder da! Seit 1974 steigt der Cop aus der Bronx umso höher, je krimineller und mörderischer er agiert und je besser er als Mensch ist. Er ist inzwischen Vizepräsident der Vereinigten Staaten und muss dennoch New York City vor dem Zugriff gieriger Politicos beschützen: mit Hilfe von Verbindungen, die tief in die Geschichte der jüdischen Mafia zurückreichen – und auch wenn er dazu raus muss aus dem Big Apple und dem mythischen Hotel Ansonia. Ausgerechnet nach Texas. Jerome Charyn »ist einer unserer wagemutigsten und interessantesten Schriftsteller«, weiß die New York Times schon lange. In seinem breiten Œuvre nehmen die Sidel-Romane einen wichtigen Platz ein und gehören zu den Großereignissen der zeitgenössischen Literatur. Sie sind harte Kriminalliteratur, urbane Mythomanien, metropole Visionen, realistische Alpträume und bewusstseinsverändernde Literatur. »Unter dem Auge Gottes« wurde ausgezeichnet mit dem Deutschen Krimi Preis (International) und ist auf der KrimiZEIT-Jahresbestenliste 2013 vertreten.

A black defense attorney struggles with his obsession with the laziest whore in HarlemFrom his penthouse in posh Sugar Hill, Edward Parkchester rules over Manhattan. A silver-tongued defense attorney with a flourishing criminal sideline, he has fame, fortune, and the respect of uptown and downtown alike. But for the right working girl he will throw it all away. He meets her at the Brig—a high-class cathouse that caters to the upper crust of Harlem society. Her name is Carla, and she does not bother to seduce him. She just lies there, munching on chocolate and working her way through the great books of Western literature. She is hypnotically indifferent, and he can't get enough. His empire is crumbling beneath him, but Parky doesn't notice. He's too entranced by a prostitute who doesn't give a damn.

When his father dies, a young bumper inherits the bloody family businessHolden is more than a bill collector. He's a killer. His father came to New York from Belgium to spend his life driving cars for the Aladdin Fur Company. But Holden has more ambition than his old man, and rises to the rank of bumper—a violent collector of debts that cannot be paid. But when his father dies, Holden departs for Europe, to live in seclusion until his money runs out. And it's then that his father's real business comes to call. The old man was a bumper too, but he killed for a slightly higher class of criminal. And now that he's gone, his employers want his son to take his place. Holden would like to to refuse, but murder is in his blood, and no man can resist his family legacy.

A stylish killer makes the mistake of befriending a godThough he doesn't know mink from sable, Sidney Holden is the most important employee at Aladdin Furs. He is a bumper, a well-dressed killer who collects the debts that cannot be paid, and Aladdin would be nothing without him. After all, fur is murder. As Cuban refugees flood the United States, the New York criminal class is rocked by the appearance of a Santería sect that hails a young girl as the newest incarnation of Changó, their bloodthirsty thunder god. But after a routine hit, Holden finds the girl cowering under the kitchen table—a divine witness to a double murder. Unable to kill her, he takes her with him, sparking an all-out turf war so vicious that Holden will be happy to have any god on his side.

After decades of madness in the Bronx, Isaac Sidel visits the craziest state in the country Isaac Sidel is too popular to be America's vice president. Once the New York Police Department commissioner, he became the most beloved mayor in the city's history—famous for his refusal to surrender his Glock, and for his habit of disappearing for months at a time to fight crime at street level. So when baseball czar J. Michael Storm asks Sidel to join him on the election's Democratic ticket, the two wild men romp to an unprecedented landslide. But as the president-elect's mandate goes off the rails—threatened by corruption, sex, and God knows what else—he tires of being overshadowed by Sidel, and dispatches him to a place from which tough politicians seldom return: Texas. In the Lone Star state, Sidel confronts rogue astrologers, accusations of pedophilia, and a dimwitted assassin who doesn't know when to take an easy shot. If this Bronx bomber doesn't watch his step, he risks making vice-presidential history by getting killed on the job.

When a friend's crime spree threatens his legal empire, a powerful New York attorney must race to stop it—before at least one of them winds up deadEdward Parkchester, or Parky, “the black eagle,” is the most successful criminal lawyer in town. He looms over Manhattan from his lair in Sugar Hill and has only one client, Byron Abando, a Mafia prince with a Phi Beta Kappa key. But the black eagle suddenly finds his empire in ruins. Freeman Faulks, a detective who helped steer Parky out of a troubled childhood at the Abraham Lincoln projects, has gone on a crime spree, sticking up a bunch of liquor stores. Parky has to find Freeman, but first he will have to match wits with his own boss, Byron Abando, and with Sandra Sutpen, the high priestess of federal prosecutors—who likes to toss her underpants at enemies and the men she loves. There's something sinister behind Faulks's crime spree, and if Parky doesn't move fast enough, he might not make it out of Manhattan alive.

A hitman comes out of retirement to rescue his kidnapped fiancéeAfter he stops killing for money, Sidney Holden tries to live discreetly. He takes a Manhattan apartment in the Copenhagen building, a few blocks from where John Lennon died, and attempts to make a new life with his fiancée, Fay, former daughter-in-law of the district attorney. But as the quiet months pass, Fay grows distant and suicidal, and finally disappears, removed by the district attorney to a mental hospital where Holden cannot reach her. Hungry for a last taste of action, a billionaire ex-gangster named Phipps offers to help Holden get her back. The ninety-two-year-old Phipps hires Holden to run a counterfeiting scheme, using Fay's whereabouts as bait. But the closer Holden gets to Phipps'operation, the less he trusts the old man. And with the DA and the mafia closing on him, Holden may not stay alive long enough to rescue his darling from her prison.

Disguised as a bum and living in a flophouse, Sidel tries to save a streetwalkerThe ragged old man has a tapeworm in his gut and a room at a nameless Whore's Row hotel, but to those in the know, he is one of the most powerful people in New York. Once the first deputy of the police commissioner, Isaac Sidel has lived in impoverished exile ever since the death of his detective protégé, Manfred Coen. As he wanders the streets around Times Square, Sidel spies a prostitute with a fearsome scar: a letter D seared into her cheek. His pity stirred, he asks her name and buys her a meal. Afterwards, he sets out to destroy the man who branded her. Sidel's target is a pimp with a love for James Joyce and a hand in the pocket of the police commissioner. Taking him down will mean upending the force that Sidel once served, but if the tapeworm doesn't stop him, no crook can.

A secret tryst threatens to turn two cops against each otherIsaac Sidel is a bear of a cop. Although his position as the commissioner's first deputy is largely political, Sidel has not forgotten how to work the New York City streets. To protect the East Side he has survived gunfights, broken arms, and once tore out a hoodlum's eyes. In his spare time he does favors for old friends, finding runaway daughters and protecting merchants from roving street gangs. On the street there is no problem he can't solve, but at home he is powerless. His daughter Marilyn, twenty-five and twice divorced, keeps Sidel up at night. Just before her father goes to Paris for a lecture on police work, Marilyn runs away from her newest husband and shacks up with Manfred Coen, Sidel's blue-eyed protégé cop. Both men love her, and when Marilyn becomes a target, they'll destroy the city to save her, if they don't kill each other first.

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.

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.

On the eve of a White House run, Sidel cleans up a mess in his old backyardTired of being led by weaklings, the American people have fallen in love with J. Michael Storm and Isaac Sidel, the lawyer and the New York mayor who saved the country from the worst baseball strike in history. The Democratic National Convention is at Madison Square Garden, and when Storm is nominated for the presidency, he's going to put the eccentric, gun-toting Sidel at the bottom of the ticket. But before Sidel can take his shot at the White House, he has a few loose ends to tie up. He's most preoccupied with a father-and-son detective team suspected of running a murder-for-hire operation that went south, resulting in the father shooting his son. Sidel suspects there's more to the story, and until he's gotten to the bottom of it, the vice presidency will have to wait.