Description:
A startling novel of a celebrated author whose life was warped by war, shrouded in mystery, and broken by scandal.
Review Quotes:
Praise for Jerzy: A Novel
New York Times "Editors' Choice" selection
Evening Standard "Best Summer Beach Reads" selection
"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. His prose has some of the rapid-fire but carefully controlled energy of Thomas Pynchon's early novella The Crying of Lot 49." --New York Times Book Review
"Intriguing. . . . Lively. . . . Perhaps Kosinski lied and dissembled more than was strictly necessary, but as Charyn's puzzle-box novel demonstrates, it's hard to argue with the results." --Toronto Star
"Brilliantly fascinating, weirdly original." --Evening Standard
"Daringly imaginative and profoundly insightful." --Booklist (starred review)
"The rise and fall of novelist Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) emerges in an offbeat way . . . through Charyn's resourceful imagination and always-colorful, punchy, provocative prose." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Peels back the layers of myth and artifice built up by chameleon-like Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski. . . . Through triangulating voices and stories, Charyn manages to get close to the truth, and does so with beautiful, spare prose." --Publishers Weekly
"A fast-paced, minimalist exploration of one of 20th century's most elusive literary figures." --Shelf Awareness
"Gripping. . . . Charyn will expertly guide you through the shadowy life of this most enigmatic of artists in this imaginative and provocative novel." --Historical Novels Review
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 is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination." --William Giraldi
"[Charyn's] sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable." --Jonathan Lethem
"One of our most rewarding novelists." --Larry McMurtry
"No one writes historical fiction better than Jerome Charyn." --Brenda Wineapple
"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
"One of our most intriguing fiction writers." --O, The Oprah Magazine
"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 is an institution. . . . His skill is such that it's difficult to separate the real-world figures and entities from the characters and places the author is inventing." --Washington Independent Review of Books
"Charyn, as he has proven time and time again, is a master of the written word." --Jewish Journal
"Charyn makes artful use of historical fact and fiction's panache." --Kirkus Reviews
"Wherever he takes us, Charyn's mind is always agile, and his prose is stunningly electric." --Jewish Book Council