Jerome Charyn. (2016). A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Bellevue Literary Press.

Jerome Charyn. 2016. A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Bellevue Literary Press.

Jerome Charyn, A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Bellevue Literary Press, 2016.

Jerome Charyn. A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Bellevue Literary Press, 2016.

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     Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Jerzy: A Novel (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press); A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century; Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories; I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War; and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. Among other honors, he has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, was named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.
     

   • name: Jerome Charyn

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A Loaded Gun

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PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist
O, The Oprah Magazine “Best Books of Summer" selection
“Magnetic nonfiction." —O, The Oprah Magazine
“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
We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote:
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
...
Though I than He— may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—
Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today.
Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. He lives in New York.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: O, The Oprah Magazine
   • content: "A magnetic nonfiction reevaluation of the mystifying, radical, perhaps bisexual, and maybe greatest-ever American poet."
2. • premium: False
   • source: New York Review of Books
   • content: "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.'"
3. • premium: False
   • source: VICE magazine
   • content: "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--.'"
4. • premium: False
   • source: Philadelphia Inquirer
   • content: "[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."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Bay Area Reporter
   • content: "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."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Ploughshares
   • content: "An imaginative and unprecedented look at Emily Dickinson that is part biography, part literary criticism, and altogether fascinating."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Lavender Magazine
   • content: "Charyn has followed Dickinson as assiduously as Alice down the rabbit hole. . . . Is Dickinson gay? Read Charyn's fascinating thesis and decide."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Scranton Examiner
   • content: "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."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Late Night Library
   • content: "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."
10. • premium: False
    • source: University Bookman
    • content: "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."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
    • content: "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."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Nordstrom's The Thread
    • content: "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."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
    • content: "A postmodernism-flavored study of Emily Dickinson's life and work. . . . [A] lively reassessment [with] vivid commentary."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus Reviews
    • content: "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."
15. • premium: False
    • source: Library Journal
    • content: "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."
16. • premium: False
    • source: Historical Novels Review
    • content: "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...
17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from December 7, 2015
      Novelist and nonfiction author Charyn (The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson) presents a postmodernism-flavored study of Emily Dickinson’s life and work. His lively reassessment draws on the work of other scholars, close readings of Dickinson’s poems and letters, and vivid commentary on the artists she inspired. Joseph Cornell created shadow boxes based on her poems, and Joyce Carol Oates’s futuristic short story “EDickinsonRepliLuxe” evokes the doll-like mystery of the only extant image of Dickinson—a daguerreotype taken when she was 16. At the heart of Charyn’s study is a quest to find out who Emily Dickinson really was. His answer is that she was not the reclusive virgin often pictured, but rather a woman of “Promethean ambition” who raged against a culture that had no place for unmarried, childless women. Looked upon as a “half-cracked village muse,” she guarded her privacy fiercely so she could work, often at a feverish pace, reinventing the language of poetry. She wrote about volcanoes, physical passion, wild beasts, rape, madness, and the grave, and was “at war with language itself” as if on a quest “to tear apart the order and hierarchy of all things.” For Charyn, Dickinson has no equal as a poet, except perhaps Shakespeare. No one else, he says, took the risks she did. Illus.

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 15, 2015
      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 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

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

34

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PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist
O, The Oprah Magazine “Best Books of Summer" selection
“Magnetic nonfiction." —O, The Oprah Magazine
“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
We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote:
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
...
Though I than He— may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—
Through...

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Loaded Gun Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century

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Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century

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tableOfContents

Author's Note
Chapter One: ZERO AT THE BONE
Chapter Two: THE TWO EMILYS—AND THE EARL
Chapter Three: DAEMON DOG
Chapter Four: JUDITH SHAKESPEARE & MARGARET MAHER
Chapter Five: BALLERINAS IN A BOX
Chapter Six: PHANTOM LADY
Chapter Seven: WITHIN A MAGIC PRISON
Chapter Eight: NOTHING
Chapter Nine: CLEOPATRA'S COMPANY
Chapter Ten: THE WITCH'S HOUR
Coda
Endnotes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Permissions

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2. • code: BIO022000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Women
3. • code: LIT014000
   • description: Literary Criticism / Poetry