Praise for A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century
Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award Short List
PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist
Firecracker Award Finalist
O, The Oprah Magazine “Best Books of Summer” selection
Longreads “Best of the Year: Most Popular Exclusives” selection
“Remarkable insight . . . [a] unique meditation/investigation. . . . Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“A magnetic nonfiction reevaluation of the mystifying, radical, perhaps bisexual, and maybe greatest-ever American poet.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“In A Loaded Gun, [Charyn] is again out to release Dickinson from the myths that have enclosed her. . . . With essayistic chapters on Dickinson’s mother, her dog, her servants, her photographic image, her poetic fragments—Charyn’s book is perhaps best viewed as yet another imaginative attempt to get to the source of Dickinson’s emotional intensity, and to imagine an ‘Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century.’” —New York Review of Books
“[Emily Dickinson] will blow the top of your head off, no matter what century you live in. Charyn looks at a lot of ways to see this revolutionary, subversive, explosive genius.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“Ecstatic. . . . [Charyn] may be the perversely perfect critic for the poet who wandered ‘The House of Supposition — / The Glimmering Frontier that / Skirts the Acres of Perhaps—.’” —VICE magazine
“Charyn is a man, a New Yorker, living in the twenty-first century, yet he understands this female rebel from New England like no one else can.” —Scranton Examiner
“A Loaded Gun is an invitation to meet Dickinson on the dizzyingly high ground of her imagination from a fellow writer who has done just that with his own writing.” —Bay Area Reporter
“A postmodernism-flavored study of Emily Dickinson’s life and work. . . . [A] lively reassessment [with] vivid commentary.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A writer obsessed with the Belle of Amherst imagines her rich, sensual inner life. . . . Charyn’s ardent sleuthing yields a daring portrait of the elusive ‘enchantress’ and her world.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Charyn’s] inviting prose allows readers with any degree of expertise on the life and work of Dickinson an entryway into her innovative, marvelous poetry.” —Library Journal
“A celebrated master of literary voice, Charyn inhabits Dickinson from the first page. . . . [A Loaded Gun] is a gratifying nut of poetic analysis, historical psychology, and the passionate homage of a lifelong disciple of the beloved Belle of Amherst.” —Historical Novels Review
“An intense work of literary scholarship. . . . [H]ighly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review
“In A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn penetrates to the heart of Emily Dickinson, commonly thought to be a gifted but withdrawn spinster. He explores the ‘demon’ in her, the ‘predator,’ and should make readers go back to her poetry with a new understanding of why she still works her spell in our time.” —Herbert Gold, author of Still Alive: A Temporary Condition and Fathers Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems
“Jerome Charyn’s A Loaded Gun is a staggeringly brilliant meditation on Emily Dickinson’s life and work, one that will shatter forever the myth of ‘the virgin recluse.’ His shrewd and provocative reading of her life, her loves, and her times allows us to understand in new ways just how Dickinson reinvented the language of poetry itself. One of the great and most original storytellers of our time, Charyn takes us deep inside the mysterious power and glory of Dickinson’s poetry, and into the strange, bold fearlessness of her outlaw life.” —Jay Neugeboren, author of Imagining Robert and After Camus
“Provocative, sexy, pulsing with energy, and sometimes outrageous, Jerome Charyn’s A Loaded Gun revisits the subject he ‘couldn’t let go’ after completing his novel, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Tunneling into the poems, letters, biographies, and works of art inspired by Dickinson, Charyn presents the poet as ‘a Satanic, catlike sibyl,’ adept with masks, tricks, and outlaw escapes from convention. Keeping the subjects of the poet’s family, religion, sexuality, and poetic ‘tradecraft’ whirling in the air, he shows us Emily Dickinson as a ‘target who never sits still.’” —Susan Snively, author of Skeptic Traveler and The Heart Has Many Doors: A Novel of Emily Dickinson
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’s] sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” —Jonathan Lethem
“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker
“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 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, 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
