Praise for Sergeant Salinger
“A masterly portrait of a young man’s terrible war.” —The Times
“Intense and absorbing.” —The Reporter
“Wonderfully recreates the war years of J. D. Salinger. . . . If you are looking for a more nuanced war novel, a story of World War II and what it did to the young men forced to fight it, this is the book for you.” —Michigan Daily
“A bravura slice of creative reconstruction. . . . Charyn triumphantly adds to the wealth of historical war fiction, while exercising his right as a fiction author to rewrite our understanding of another.” —Daily Mail
“Two intriguing suggestions are buried deeply in the story that Charyn tells so compellingly in Sergeant Salinger. One is that Salinger could have but chose not to write one of the great war novels of the twentieth century. (In a real sense, Charyn has done it for him.) The other is that Salinger’s experience of war drove him to explore only the inner lives of the characters he invented and to hide his own inner life from the generations of readers who revere him.” —Jewish Journal
“Charyn wisely avoids the biographical novel’s penchant for the blow-by-blow, scene-by-scene recounting of all the important moments in the subject’s life. Instead we are immersed in the immediacy of war as Salinger . . . has to psyche out the phonies and somehow remain true to himself.” —University Bookman
“[A] literary tour de force. . . . Charyn vividly portrays [J.D. Salinger’s] journey from slick short story writer to suffering artist. The winning result humanizes a legend.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This supremely engaging novel leaves us with a new, sometimes heart-rending understanding of [J.D. Salinger] and the times in which he came of age.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Charyn deftly leaves the reader wondering whether Holden Caulfield’s teenage angst was really Salinger’s personification of post-traumatic stress disorder. . . . Engrossing.” —Library Journal
“Nuanced and acutely perceptive. . . . Charyn offers an astute psychological portrait of an elusive yet vastly compelling subject.” —Booklist
“Charyn peers into the traumas that formed the lifelong recluse and his enigmatic stories. . . . The whole story makes for an engaging and informative rendering of an important American author.” —Historical Novels Review
“An in depth look at one of our most celebrated of writers. . . . Charyn answers the question of how it was meant to be for Salinger to write that novel that unwittingly summoned the world.” —Comics Grinder
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
“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
“Absolutely unique among American writers.” —Los Angeles Times
“A contemporary American Balzac.” —Newsday
“Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words.” —Washington Post
“[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 makes artful use of historical fact and fiction’s panache.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Charyn, as he has proven time and time again, is a master of the written word.” —Jewish Journal
“Wherever he takes us, Charyn’s mind is always agile, and his prose is stunningly electric.” —Jewish Book Council
