Jerzy

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE A startling novel of a celebrated author whose life was warped by war, shrouded in mystery, and broken by scandal. 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.

About the Author :
Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Maria La Divina; Ravage & Son; Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his work has been longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and PEN Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and selected as a finalist for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Culture at the American University of Paris, Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Manhattan.

Review :
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