Bitter Bronx-Giveaway

Well here I am once again.  Happier than you can believe!  Why?  

Because I have had the pleasure of having my favorite author indulge me in his newest short stories.  Yes, Jerome Charyn has once again graced me with that gravelly voice that he writes with so well.  I hear the noise of kids yelling as they play while moms shout down their matriarchal blessings in the form of dire warnings.  You can see Bitter Bronx as it is laid out line by line just like the Grand Concourse cutting across from Yankee Stadium to Kingbridge Heights.  

It is great to be able to hear these stories as if Sam Spade's illegitimate third cousin had decided that law does not pay as well as crime does.  Not that the characters set out to live a life on the edge, it is just that the edge is so close to the center in the Bronx.  Pull up a seat here with me and fall in to a world where you hear a smokey voice purr or see an off set nose set the tone of one's face, just like watching a black and white movie.  Pure classic work! 

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).

Jerome Charyn's stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, Epoch, Narrative, Ellery Queen, and other magazines. His most recent novel is I Am Abraham. He lived for many years in Paris and currently resides in Manhattan.

You can find Bitter Bronx on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble for just $12.59 ebook or $24.95 hardcover


Thanks so to both Jerome Charyn and to Tribute Books for hosting this giveaway of $25 Amazon gift card or PayPal cash.  You can enter via the Rafflecopter form below.

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