Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories

by Jerome Charyn

Overview

Longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award

Brooklyn is dead. Long live the Bronx! In Bitter Bronx, Jerome Charyn returns to his roots and leads the literary renaissance of an oft-overlooked borough in this surprising new collection.

In Bitter Bronx, one of our most gifted and 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.

Bitter Bronx is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with Jerome Charyn's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a "land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders."

In "Lorelei," a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in "Archy and Mehitabel" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in "Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories—"Silk & Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla"—Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, New York Times).

Throughout it all looms the "master builder" Robert Moses, a man who believed he could "save" the Bronx by building a highway through it, dynamiting whole neighborhoods in the process. Bitter Bronx stands as both a fictional eulogy for the people and places paved over by Moses' expressway and an affirmation of Charyn's "brilliant imagination" (Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871404893
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/01/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

“One of the most important writers in American literature” (Michael Chabon), Jerome Charyn is the award-winning author of more than fifty works, including The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. A renowned scholar of twentieth-century Hollywood, he lives in Manhattan.

Editorial Reviews

…an interlocking collection of sharp-edged short fiction…[Charyn's] tortured characters cut risky and self-destructive paths through the decades that have seen Bronx glories—like the Art Deco grandeur of the Grand Concourse—fade into graffiti-covered, vacant-lot, broken-glass ruin, and then inch back…Despite the hard edges, and there are many, a rich sweetness flows just below the surface of Bitter Bronx.

The New York Times Book Review - Wendell Jamieson

04/06/2015
Tough on the outside but tender at heart, the 13 stories in this volume serve as a nostalgic elegy to the Bronx of the past. In “Lorelei,” a con man returns to his childhood home and finds his high school sweetheart trapped in a grotesque state of mutual dependency with her father. “Dee” explores the relationship between Diane Arbus and Eddie Carmel, the so-called Jewish Giant of the Bronx, made famous by her photographs. In “Major Leaguer,” a former baseball player develops an uneasy alliance with a neighborhood drug lord whose father remembered the one game that he played for the New York Yankees. The setting for all of the stories is a Bronx divided into north and south by “an expressway, which had turned everything around it into a vast moonscape of flattened warehouses and empty lots,” and the titular bitterness is Charyn’s own at the blight brought to the borough he remembers from childhood. For all that, Charyn’s well-drawn characters nonetheless flourish, and most manage to rise above their decrepit surroundings, such as the high school teacher in “Milo’s Last Chance” who infects his barrio students with his enthusiasm for poetry “until they began to sing out words like some wild soprano.” Mixing equal parts grit and charm, there’s no need to have set foot in the Bronx to enjoy these stories. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"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]."

Wall Street Journal - Abraham Socher

"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

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

BookPage

"In this collection of stories, Charyn’s characters leave blighted streets only to boomerang back to a part of New York ‘in permanent recession.’ With echoes of Walt Whitman’s fantastical city and the hard-broiled territory of Mickey Spillane, Bitter Bronx elevates the borough’s stoops and sidewalks into the realm of myth."

O Magazine

"[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."

New York Review of Books - Phillip Lopate

"Memories and imagination mingle to particularly edgy and bewitching effect in [Charyn’s] Bronx fables, which echo the Jewish gangster stories in The Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel…. Charyn’s dark, sexy, droll, and lacerating urban folktales of gangster tyranny, thwarted desire, and desperate measures are wizardly and bittersweet."

Booklist, Starred review - Donna Seaman

"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] is to the Bronx what Saul Bellow, early in his career, was to Upper Broadway—bard, celebrant, mythologizer."

Jonathan Yardley

"Sharp-edged short stories…Charyn’s narrative sleight of hand is wonderfully at play…. Despite the hard edges, and there are many, a rich sweetness flows just below the surface of Bitter Bronx."

Wendell Jamieson

"With an almost breathless style, Charyn gives readers compelling characters who are restless, reckless and desperate…. Every single tale here is short, brutal, harrowing, heartbreaking, mesmerizing and altogether unforgettable."

Bookreporter.com - Sarah Rachel Egelman

"Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature."

Michael Chabon

"It is no small achievement to be the Babel of the Bronx."

Leslie Epstein

★ 2015-04-01
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. The opening line, "Howell was still on the lam," establishes a noirish tone and diction that will appear often, beginning with this tale of a man who travels the U.S. conning widows until he returns to his Bronx hometown and rediscovers an old flame. The time of the collection spans the postwar era, when New York gangs danced into West Side Story, through the sad days of the 1950s, after a Robert Moses highway split Charyn's boyhood turf, uprooted neighborhoods, and led, in the 1970s, to the desolation of the South Bronx. Historical figures enter these little fictions, just as admitted fabrications drifted into two Charyn childhood memoirs (Bronx Boy, 2002; The Black Swan, 2000). A Diane Arbus type named Dee tries to capture in a photo the soul of the 8-foot-9-inch Eddie Carmel. Mobster Frank Costello moves in the background of a trio of stories featuring a good-looking kid who becomes a male model ("I was 15 when Rosenzweig discovered me at the Frick Collection"). In another trio, a Manhattan woman discovers where her sister vanished to at age 5 and retrieves her from a "home for alcoholic movie stars and mental patients." 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 in "the wild lands of the Bronx." And some stories soar: in particular, the troubled romance between a plumber and an Irish nurse in "Major Leaguer," which artfully assembles such Bronx icons as street gangs, the drug trade, Robert Moses, and the New York Yankees. Charyn calls the work "no sentimental journey through my own traces as a child," yet there's a writer's deep affection here for a world full of color and character.

Kirkus Reviews