Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories - Tapa dura

It is no small achievement to be the Babel of the Bronx.--Leslie Epstein

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.--Michael Chabon

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.--Jonathan Lethem

Charyn constructs hella work, powerful images in condensed language. While some stories are set in the near or distant past, others feel timeless to the point of taking place just yesterday.--Douglas Lord

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

[Jerome Charyn] is to the Bronx what Saul Bellow, early in his career, was to Upper Broadway--bard, celebrant, mythologizer.--Jonathan Yardley

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

Jerome Charyn's Bronx is a landscape of magic and passion. With...American yearning and a stage full of unforgettable characters.

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....

[T]here are certain constants in Charyn's work: an energetic, urbane prose, a playful approach to narrative, a fascination with history, and a downbeat, noir-ish perspective. This fatalistic outlook coexists comfortably with the ebullient verve and propulsion of his prose.... Whether writing about Yiddish theatre or silent film or movie palaces or old Bronx neighborhoods, Charyn is the curator, celebrant, and mourner of lost worlds.... The prose impresses with its accumulation of apt details, fresh diction, and serpentine syntax.... Is Charyn truly a romantic or a trickster? Hard to say on the basis of these entertaining stories: probably both. They are written with confidence, fluidity, mischievous aplomb, and a lifetime's worth of acquired literary skill. A light ironic touch peeps through these tales of doomed passion, as though the septuagenarian Charyn were mocking his own former searching for a movie-type love, his previous 'constant adolescence' of hungering for dream women.--Phillip Lopate

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, New York Times), 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."