Praise for A Loaded Gun
PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist
O, The Oprah Magazine “Best Books of Summer” selection
Philadelphia Inquirer “Spring Ahead Into the World of Books” selection
Nordstrom’s The Thread “Weekend Guide” selection
Longreads “Best of the Year: Most Popular Exclusives” selection
Ploughshares “Indie Spotlight: Year-end Wrap-up” selection
Publishers Weekly “Book of the Week” & PW Daily “Review of the Day” selection
“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
“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
“[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
“Less literary criticism than threnody, a bold, loose-limbed, Whitman-like prose-poem lamenting the constrictive previous, but still prevailing, notions of Dickinson and lauding instead a wild woman of words. . . . 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
“An imaginative and unprecedented look at Emily Dickinson that is part biography, part literary criticism, and altogether fascinating.” —Ploughshares
“Charyn has followed Dickinson as assiduously as Alice down the rabbit hole. . . . Is Dickinson gay? Read Charyn’s fascinating thesis and decide.” —Lavender 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 a fascinating meditation on an individual’s relationship to language and her place in the world, and Charyn’s quest will appeal not only to poetry lovers and Dickinson fans, but to anyone who understands the joy of immersing oneself in a puzzle to which no definitive ‘answer’ yet exists.” —Late Night Library
“Reading Jerome Charyn sometimes evokes the sensation of seeing Dickinson arise from her poems. . . . [H]e is about the work of enlarging the universe of her person and her poetry while he shows how much more there is still to do in fathoming her depths and contours.” —UniversityBookman
“Charyn is intrigued by the hermeneutics of biography and literary criticism. He is steeped in the work of Dickinson scholars and readers. . . . For Charyn the poems are Emily Dickinson, the vital part of herself that as a woman in nineteenth-century Massachusetts she could only fully express by keeping to herself—not as someone shy of society so much as one who knew society simply could not reciprocate what she had to offer. In other words, Charyn’s Dickinson is not agoraphobic, not a neurotic, but a writer in charge of her destiny.” —Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
“In his reexamination of Dickinson as a sensitive recluse, Charyn does the influential poetess justice by admitting her ambition. Dickinson’s irreverence for grammatical and societal convention made her a revolutionary figure. Charyn gives the writer due credit for engineering her reputation and role, and not being a victim to it.” —Nordstrom’s The Thread
“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 explores how the gaps in knowledge about Dickinson’s biography and writings contribute to her ever-expanding mystique. . . . [His] 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 When a Psychopath Falls in Love
“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 The Other Side of the World
“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, author of Wild Nights! and The Lost Landscape
“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 The Heart Has Many Doors and Skeptic Traveler
Praise for Jerome Charyn
“One of the most important writers in American literature.” —Michael Chabon
“One of our finest writers. . . . Whatever milieu [Charyn] chooses to inhabit, . . . his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” —Jonathan Lethem
“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
“A fearless writer. . . . Brave and brazen.” —New York Review of Books
“One of our most intriguing fiction writers.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker
“Both a serious writer and an immensely approachable one, always witty and readable and . . . interesting.” —Washington Post
“Absolutely unique among American writers.” —Los Angeles Times
“A contemporary American Balzac.” —Newsday
Praise for Jerome Charyn’s The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel
“In his breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism, Jerome Charyn pulls off the nearly impossible: in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson he imagines an Emily Dickinson of mischievousness, brilliance, desire, and wit (all which she possessed) and then boldly sets her amidst a throng of historical, fictional, and surprising characters just as hard to forget as she is. This is a bold book, but we’d expect no less of this amazing novelist.” —Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
“Daring.” —New York Times Book Review
“Audacious. . . . Seductive. . . . Charyn has never written more powerfully. . . . A poignant, delicately rendered vision.” —New York Review of Books
“Through a perceptive reading of Dickinson’s verse and correspondence, [Charyn’s] re-created her wild mind in all its erudition, playfulness and nervous energy.” —Washington Post
“Compellingly drawn. . . . I admire Charyn’s achievement in lifting the veil of a heretofore mysterious figure.” —Los Angeles Times
“Breezily chronicles the chaotic emotional life of Emily Dickinson.” —New Yorker
“In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination.” —Booklist (starred review)
01/01/2016
Almost everything about America's most mythical poet, Emily Dickinson (1830–86), is a mystery. In his nonfiction counterpart to his popular novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, Charyn explores how the gaps in knowledge about Dickinson's biography and writings contribute to her ever-expanding mystique. As a result, Charyn's book forsakes chronology for meditations on thematic details he finds important in the poet's life, such as her complicated relationship with her parents; her dog, Carlo; her love affairs—whether real or unrequited—with men and women; and a recently discovered daguerreotype that might be the second-known photograph of Dickinson. Charyn also devotes plenty of pages to writers, artists, and scholars whom he feels have best understood Dickinson's writings, such as scholars Jay Leyda and Marta Werner, poet Adrienne Rich, and artists Joseph Cornell and Jen Bervin. VERDICT Despite the book's apparent lack of cohesion, Charyn is an engaging author who clearly appreciates his subject. The inviting prose allows readers with any degree of expertise on the life and work of Dickinson an entryway into her innovative, marvelous poetry.—Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA
2015-11-04
A writer obsessed with the Belle of Amherst imagines her rich, sensual inner life. After spending two years writing a novel, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010), Charyn (Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, 2015, etc.) felt dissatisfied: "I knew less and less the more I learned about her." Now he turns to nonfiction, mining the prodigious research he conducted for the novel: biographies, literary criticism, archival research, "psychoanalytic studies of her crippled, wounded self, tales of her martyrdom in the nineteenth century, studies of her iconic white dress, accounts of her agoraphobia," and interviews with artists, poets, and scholars. Charyn analyzes artist Joseph Cornell's evocation of Dickinson and poet Adrienne Rich's empathetic interpretation. The result is an absorbing, though necessarily speculative, meditation on Dickinson's personality, yearnings, and elliptical poetry. For Charyn, Dickinson was a powerful, mysterious woman in charge of her own life. He dismisses the idea that she was a "helpless agoraphobic, trapped in her room in her father's house," although her father was overbearing and kept his daughters "on an invisible leash." Dickinson, he believes, was equally tyrannical. "She built a whirlwind around her and lived within its walls." She was "promiscuous in her own fashion, deceiving everyone around her with the sly masks she wore." She was an outlaw, "an alchemist," a "witch of the Imagination," "the mistress of her own interior time and space," and possibly bisexual. Charyn is intrigued by one scholar's argument that Dickinson had a romance with another woman, with whom she may have sat for a daguerreotype reproduced as the book's frontispiece. "None of us will ever get near enough to Emily," he writes ruefully. While much is speculation, Charyn's ardent sleuthing yields a daring portrait of the elusive "enchantress" and her world.
