Ravage & Son

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A master storytellers novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century Manhattan

Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattans Lower East Sidethe cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth centuryin a dark mirror.

Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish Mr. Hyde, a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.

A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.

Reviews

Select Praise for Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writerso 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

[Charyns] sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable. Jonathan Lethem

One of our most rewarding novelists. Larry McMurtry

Among Charyns writerly gifts is a dazzling energya 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

Charyns 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 fictions 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, Charyns mind is always agile, and his prose is stunningly electric. Jewish Book Council

Author Bio

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Ravage & Son (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in August 2023); Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his work has been longlisted for the PEN Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and selected as a finalist for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.