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Charyn, Jerome

(1937-    ) US author who was born and educated in New York, which city he gradually transformed in his fiction into a Magic-Realist venue whose mythopoeic resonances and exorbitant happenings hover (see Equipoise) at the edge of generic displacements (and beyond), and strongly prefigure the fabulated New York of writers like John Crowley, Mark Helprin or Jonathan Lethem; active from around 1960. The long nonfantastic (though fabulistic) Isaac Sidel sequence of detective novels, beginning with Blue Eyes (1975), casts a mythopoeic glow over greater New York [series not listed below]. Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land (1986) powerfully realizes the city in nonfiction terms, just as Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture (1989) anatomizes Hollywood (see California; Cinema). Few of his fifty or so books are actually fantasy or sf; but Eisenhower, My Eisenhower (1971) edges into the Near Future in its rendering of an apocalyptic youth culture built around worship of the god Karooku; Darlin' Bill: A Love Story of the Wild West (1980) creates an almost totally imaginary West; and Pinocchio's Nose (1983) carries its stymied protagonist into the twenty-first century, where he finally learns to relax, though the world itself is battered; La Femme du magicien (graph 1986; trans by author as The Magician's Wife 1987) with François Boucq is a supernatural tale involving considerable Sex and mesmerism; Death of a Tango King (1998) is a Magic Realist Fabulation whose protagonist, a woman just released from Prison, travels under orders from the CIA into South America, where Ecological devastation is universal, and intimations of the new century generate a sense that she has entered a heart of darkness (see Joseph Conrad). [JC]

Jerome Charyn

born New York: 13 May 1937

works (highly selected)

• Eisenhower, My Eisenhower (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971) [hb/David Holzman]
• Darlin' Bill: A Love Story of the Wild West (New York: Arbor House, 1980) [hb/]
• Pinocchio's Nose (New York: Arbor House, 1983) [hb/Janet Halverson]
• La Femme du magicien (Brussels, Belgium: Casterman, 1986) with François Boucq [graphic novel: illus/François Boucq (1955-    ): pb/]
  • The Magician's Wife (New York: Catalan Communications, 1987) with François Boucq [graphic novel: trans of the above: illus/François Boucq (1955-    ): pb/]
• Billy Budd, K.G.B. (New York: Catalan Communications, 1991) with François Boucq [graphic novel: trans by Elizabeth Bell from unsourced original: illus/François Boucq (1955-    ): pb/]
• Death of a Tango King (New York: New York University Press, 1998) [hb/]
• The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: W W Norton, 2010) [hb/]
• Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2020) [hb/]
• Big Red: A Novel Starring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles (New York: Liveright, 2022) [Orson Welles: hb/]

collections

• The Man Who Grew Younger and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Row, 1967) [coll: hb/Fred Wellington]

nonfiction

• Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land (New York: G P Putnam's Sons, 1986) [nonfiction: hb/from Malcah Zeldis, "Journey's End"]
• Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture (New York: G P Putnam's Sons, 1989) [nonfiction: hb/]

links

• Jerome Charyn
• Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Picture Gallery

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 01:43 am on 27 July 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/charyn_jerome>