THE NEW MYSTERY: THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CRIME WRITERS ESSENTIAL CRIME WRITING OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY, edited by Jerome Charyn, is one of the finest short story anthologies I have read. It seems like everybody's here. If you don't like Joyce Carol Oates's novels, here's something short: "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again". It's about a spoiled white girl who goes slumming, gets beat up and sold into servitude. Just the idea makes me tingle all over. Raymond's Carver's "Cathedral" is also here. The man's a technician. He doesn't tell you anything you don't need to know. If you couldn't plow your way through L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, James Ellroy offers "Gravy Train". Definitely not politically correct. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is also included with his one-sentence, surreal story "The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship."
I have to say, though, that the real reason I recommend the anthology is because I first discovered Lawrence Block and Stuart Kaminsky in these riveting pages. Read Kaminsky's "The Man Who Hated Books" and eventually you'll find his Porfiry Rostnikov novels, the best serial going. The man knows more about modern Russia than Putin does. Block's "The Merciful Angel of Death" will lead you to his Matt Scudder novels. Matt's an ex-alcoholic, detective (without a license) in love with a high-class prostitute.

"The New Mystery" is a must-have for mystery fans and those who enjoy great stories. This anthology contains some of the best tales written by authors who are skilled in that genre, both well-known authors, such as Lawrence Block and James Ellroy, as well as international authors, whom aren't as recognizable, but add an exotic and ethnic flavor to this collection. Kudos to Mr. Jerome Charyn for editing an amazing anthology!

New York Mayor Isaac Sidel is up in the Bronx, watching a baseball game. The street wise Mayor knows that just outside the ballpark are run down neighborhoods, filled with junkies of all ages. The gangs own the borough with the dead ones immortalized by Alyoshas, a pre-teen graffiti artist. The owner of the Yankees plan to move the team, even though Isaac hopes to talk him out of it. The owner is helped by the power-hungry father of Marianna Storm, a child who tries to help the Mayor in his fight against her father. Isaac soon realizes greed is the real game. A phoney corporation is pulling off a land scam that brings together strange partners, who all share two things in common. They want to make a large killing at any cost and want to get rid of Isaac, who is in the way. Only hiz honor the mayor can stop them, but this group is willing to do anything to feed their avarice thirst. EL BRONX is the ninth Mayor Sidel novel and like the previous eight is a fabulous, fast-paced book. As good as the others are (they all are very good), this may be the best one yet because it is extremely complex without losing the ability to tell an intriguing tale. If the reader wants to understand the mean streets of New York from their living room, Jerome Charyn's series is one of the best ways to go a streeting. Harriet Klausner

This was yet another flashy novel. The author is too concerned with showing how clever he is to be bothered with a plausible plot or believable characters. The central character in particular was totally unbelievable. As much as I wanted to like it, it grew dull and dissonant about half of the way through. The ending was totally absurd ( and not in a nice way).

Thank goodness this baby came back into print! I echo what the guys below have said, and add only that if you've read other greats in this genre--The Great American Novel, The Celebrant, Shoeless Joe, Sam's Legacy--this will stand proudly along side them, and should be next.

I'm not sure how many people will read this review, since there's only one other one thus far, so I'll make it brief. If you've read all the other "classic" baseball novels, but have never stumbled across this one, you're in for a real treat. This is the ultimate "lost" baseball novel. In fact, it's the ultimate "lost" novel, period. I won't tell you what the story is about, since I don't want to give anything away. You'll just have to trust me on this one, even though you don't have any idea who the hell I am. Highly recommended even if you've never considered reading a baseball novel before! If you're browsing through the baseball novel section at Amazon (which is how I found out about the book), forget about W.P. Kinsella, Mark Harris, Philip Roth, et al. You can always read those guys later. This little gem by Charyn is one of the ones you should read first. The other is "You Know Me Al," by Ring Lardner.

"The Black Swan", is the sequel to, "The Dark Lady From Belorusse". I have not read the first volume, however the sequel stands on its own as a great piece of writing. I certainly intend to go back to the first, but if the latter were the only volume at hand, I would not hesitate to recommend others begin with it as I did. The book is described as a memoir, however there is a note at the end that states that events while based on his experiences as a youth also, "are the product of imaginative recreation". The balance of the disclaimer either is meant to be amusing, or is an effort to keep the Author out of the Federal Witness Protection Program.

The setting is The Bronx a few years after World War II. Amongst the other colorful characters, this is the time of Meyer Lansky who influences more than one event in the book. There are a host of other lesser members of the crime world that deal with anything from gambling, to cornering the market on Celery Tonic.

The one venture outside the Bronx is to the Catskill Mountains home not only to the name of the book, The Black Swan, but is also the residence of The Dark Lady who deals cards to her various infamous admirers. Throughout all of this is great humor whether of the darker sort related to King Farouk and The Bataan March, or what is the cigarette of preference at a school for asthmatics in Arizona.

After the disclaimer in the rear, I don't know where the line separating fact from imaginative recreation resides. Were all of the book true it would be a remarkable story as well as hilarious, and if fiction, nothing is diminished from a reading perspective. Who knows, maybe the kid did have a probation officer he fell hard for who was Lana Turner's twin. Fact or fantasy, who cares, a great piece of writing.

Charyn's prose defies category: though published as nonfiction, this memoir reads like some of his singular, post-modern detective fiction. Transports us back to the Bronx of yore, with a cast of characters that's unforgettable.

What are we to make of a New York City mayor who packs a Glock, wrestles corrupt cops and crooked politicians at the same time he is running as second banana in a presidential campaign? You get Issac Sidel, a.k.a. the Big Guy, a.k.a. the Citizen, and the funhouse world created by Jerome Charyn, once of the Bronx, now of Paris.

"Citizen Sidel" is a small book -- less than 220 pages -- but Sidel's a loose cannon who runs everywhere except off the page. He barely keeps ahead of the other characters, who are equally bizarre: the 12-year-old daughter of his running mate, the love of his life who's in bed with the president, and the son of a police officer, once thought dead, who resurrects himself as the protector of an inner-city neighborhood, accompanied by a large rat named Raskolnikov. Sidel himself is a thoroughbred on amphetimines, barely keeping ahead of those who want to see his campaign derailed. He moves in a shadow world of plots and counter-plots that may or may not have a tenuous link in reality.

A lot of "Citizen Sidel" has that feeling of unrealism. Watch Sidel lose a fistfight against a political operative, then give his acceptance speech on national television, see him fly over the streets of New York, looking for a 12-year-old tagger, see him campaign in America's heartland, one voter at a time, without anyone from the media nearby. He tries to rescue a World War II Romanian dictator from an asylum and his running mate's daughter from kidnappers and accuses nearly everybody of secretly working for someone else.

In the end, "Citizen Sidel" reads like an art house movie that seems profound until you walk out of the theater and try to make sense of it.

Finding a new Author is good, finding an Author that has written several dozen books that extend the new find is fantastic. The first work I read by Mr. Jerome Charyn was, "The Black Swan". That particular work was the second volume of his memoirs documenting his youth in the Bronx, and it was great reading. "Citizen Sidel", is a work of fiction that takes place around the Democratic Convention and its aftermath in New York City. The book is irreverent, has razor sharp rapid-fire dialogue, and gives no quarter to any of the topics it harpoons.

Any scandal that has taken place in the political arena is tame in comparison to the variety of activities, up to and including Capital Crimes that this Presidential run includes. There is a hitter stalking one of the Burroughs by the name of Tolstoy. A notorious Rumanian octogenarian is living in luxury in Virginia, as a guest on one of the competing US Agencies, and these are only two of several dozen outrageous characters. A 12 year old who is a speech script doctor, a potential First Lady who loathes her Daughter, as the latter is more popular.

Add to the individuals a FBI that makes Hoover's version seem like a child's game, and then toss in The CIA, The Secret Service, New York City's Finest, Gangs, and self-proclaimed super-heroes, and you begin to get an idea of this tale. While it is said that all humor contains some truth, this book is a great deal of fun to read. Jerome Charyn is a very talented writer with an insightful savage wit. Enjoy!

Charyn's idiosyncratic adventure crosses the headlong rush of a classic noir thriller with the earnest fantasy of a 12 year old kid. The result is delightful, if you're ready to come out and play, but no doubt frustrating for fans of gritty realism. If you enjoyed Martin Amis' Night Train or Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, you should try the Sidel books.

Jerome Charyn's "Dark Lady From Belorusse" is an entertaining little book, however it is practically impossible to believe that even a quarter of the events depicted in this "memoir" are true. Charyn would have us believe that he grasped situations at the age of five that wouldn't be well handled by a 50-year-old. I took the stories he tells about his mother, her interaction with local Bronx gangsters, and his dysfunctional family with a grain of salt. While some of these events may have taken place, there is no way they occurred as the author remembers them in this book. The author's fanciful embellishments can be a little annoying - what exactly does he take his readers for? - especially since he is attempting to pass the book off as a work of nonfiction. Charyn does better by his readers in his sequel to the "Dark Lady" entitled "The Black Swan," where he admits in an endnote that many of the events and characters depicted are fictional.

Disappointment over blatant fabrication aside, Charyn is a very creative writer with a vivid imagination that makes for interesting reading. His writing style can be a bit disjointed, and he sometimes clouds his descriptions with confusing, non-essential fodder that strays from the main idea. Charyn's anecdotes are entertaining if not believable, and the characters are vivid and fun to read about (although you'd probably not want to actually meet these people!). If poor little Charyn's mother and father are anything in life as they are in the book, the kid should be given a medal for survival. The portrayals are fascinating, and one would hope that there aren't too many parents out there like the one "Baby" has to endure.

"The Dark Lady..." is only about 100 pages long - you can read it in no time. If you have an afternoon to spare and don't mind the author's inability to discern fact from fiction, give it a read

I loved this little book. I'm now reading the sequal, The Black Swan. I picked them up because they take place in the Bronx, where I grew up, and Charyn is close to my age. I frequented some of the places he did, but we had wildly different experiences. He is obsessed with his beautiful mother as were so many men she knew. He was extraordinary too. Reads a little like Doctorow only this is a memoir not a fantasy--or is it?

Little Charyn goes from about five years old to seven years old in this book. How he remembers everything so vividly (or is making most of it up} I don't know. But it's great story telling. At about 100 pages a book,though, Charyn seems to be stretching out his stories in order to extract as much money per page as he can. I'm reading library copies.

The title of this oversized trade-paper comic book may be literarily clever but is kind of unfortunate! Still it's a good story with fine artwork.

The tale is about a hare-lipped Russian orphan who is trained from childhood to be a faceless KGB agent. One of the agent's teachers is a former monk who secretly gives his pupil the truth about the brutality of his superiors - and a sense of faith. When the agent is sent to America to assassinate a high-ranking KGB defector he is introduced to the mysticism of his American Indian co-workers, and turns against his vicious KGB commander.

Translated from the French it's a well-written story by Jerome Charyn, illustrated by Francois Boucq.

The erotic life of Pinocchio's gotta be one of Charyn's funniest plots. This author is rightly considered a comic genius as well as one of the best writers of picaresque novels: then why is this title out of print? Come on, with all the rubbish we get in print nowadays, I think a little space for this gem wouldn't go unnoticed...

The classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. HYde by the famous author Robert Louis Stevenson with an afterword by Jerome Charyn,was quite hard to understand. As most novels usually start hard to understand, the end was just as hard to as well. The old english in this novel was probably not as hard to understand while it was still being spoken when this book was published in 1886, but over 100 years later, the language got me off track. Although I had liked the plot of a scientist by day, evil character by night, everything just seemed too hard to comprehend.

Jekyll and Hyde is a mind twisting suspense thriller. Throughout almost every moment of the book I was waiting to see what happened next. Although the book is very exciting it can also be hard to read at times. The book was written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886. Some of the language is written in a proper old english style. Some people might read this book because it is short. The truth is that sometimes it takes a while to finish because of the difficult context. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is about a kind and friendly doctor named Henry Jekyll. He concocts some sort of potion which he tests on himself. Something horrible has happened. He is Henry Jekyll by day, of course, but by night he transforms into the malevolent Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde is a bent-over, repulsive looking man. He represents Jekyll's evil side which Jekyll cannot control. At night Hyde kills numerous amounts of people and is never caught. Everyone is puzzled as to why Hyde suddenly dissappears without a trace. At the same time Jekyll sits in his labratory all day trying to figure out a way to stop this transformation from occuring. He is always at war with his other self. he is no longer the friendly doctor everyone has come to know and love. He no longer enjoys hiss life and he will not speak with anybody. Jekyll's good friend Mr. Utterson is confused about the doctors strange behavior lately. He tries to see Jekyll, but he will not let anybody inside. He and the doctor's butler, Poole, are starting to get frightened by what they come to see. If you want to know what happenss to Dr. Jekyll read this book!

Along with "Dracula" and "Frankenstein," Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is a part of that great immortal triad of gothic terrors from the 19th century from which a seemingly endless stream of fans, imitators, critics, and dreamers continue to derive unmitigated inspiration. But despite its classic status, and the fact that virtually everyone in the English-speaking world can instantly recognize the story's title, few have ever actually read Stevenson's little nightmare (the Bantam edition runs to no more than 114 pages, including Jerome Charyn's afterword)or even seen one of its many cinematic incarnations. Of the aforementioned trio, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" certainly appears the most neglected. This, despite the fact that it is certainly the most accessible. It is indeed much shorter than either "Dracula" or "Frankenstein," and anyone with good eyes can read it in a day. Even the visually challenged amongst us can do so in two. More importantly, this book is certainly the best written of the three (in)famous works, as Stevenson was by far the most proficient and thoroughly accomplished wordsmith of the authors who gave us these benighted classics. Moreover, despite its reputation as a horror story, it is in fact more of a Victorian mystery, and for those who do not much care for horror is surely a more palatable selection than either of its brothers.

That last point is perhaps part of the problem. Readers who come to Stevenson's novella expecting to find a giant Hyde rampaging through London like Godzilla in Tokyo, or even doing his best Hannibal Lecter imitation, will be sadly disappointed. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is not about blood and thunder, however valuable those elements undeniably are in their proper place. Rather, it is a story of philosophy, soul-searching, sin and redemption. It is a subtle, scholarly tale in which much is implied but little shown, and where the goblins which haunt the London fog are only rarely permitted to stumble out to us. The modern reader, particular one weaned on such drivel as the "Scream" movies or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," will have to unlearn much he may have come to believe about effective fantasy in order to savor Stevenson's masterpiece.

Beyond that, the story's classic status and innumerable adaptations and parodies in the cinema and pop culture (particularly in the classic Bugs Bunny episode) have vampirized the tale of much of its major element--mystery. Nobody today opens this book with any doubt as to the true relationship between Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. However bowlderized our modern perceptions of this story have become, we nonetheless all know from the outside where Hyde really comes from. So the mystery that must have been so opaque, so innovative and exciting to the original audience that had nothing but Stevenson's own story to go by, is denied us. To some, that makes reading this book little more than a minor chore.

And that's a shame, because no matter how familiar this tale of the duality of Man and his eternal struggle between his Dark and Light sides may have become to us, it remains one of the most readable and thoroughly pleasurable books of its era. Stevenson's prose is precise, and with short, sure strokes he paints a tapestry of the human psyche and its unhallowed depths the like of which no modern slasher film has ever approached. Granted, the story may have been better served to give Hyde a bit more time on-stage. Perhaps some of the characters could have used some more fleshing-out. An epilogue might have served to tie the narrative up more securely...

...may, perhaps, might...ultimately those words do not matter, for whatever "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" might not be is irrelevant compared to what it is: the penultimate masterpiece of gothic mystery, and a classic that will endure long after that very genre has itself otherwise disappeared. Read it for what it is, and enjoy.

The interviews collected here span nearly thirty years, and are most remarkable for Kael's consistency of vision; that also means she says much the same things over and over again, with minor variations. The exception is the Mandate interview, where Kael clarifies her position on sexual politics in film. Those wanting to know more of her views on 90s films may well be frustrated, as the last interview was conducted in 1995, and Kael doesn't go into nearly as much detail as her written work. Be content with 'For Keeps', an excellent compilation of work from her entire career.

Pauline Kael gave us hundreds of excellently written and thought provoking movie reviews, and yet since she retired from The New Yorker, there is still an intense yearning to hear what she has to say about recent movies. One never wants her to stop writing. This book is an entertaining collection of articles and interviews that were collected through the years, many of them taken from hard to find magazines. The wonderful thing that this book shows about Pauline Kael is that she talks almost exactly like she writes--an interviewer may ask her a relatively simple question, and she'll answer in her ever-playful way that will take up at least a half page of text. She has a terrific sense of verbal rhythm as well as her famous "conversational" writing style. Those who are new to her work should read her "Deeper Into Movies" and "Reeling", the two books that cover what she feels is the most innovative period in film history--the early to mid-seventies.

This will be a short review because there's no point in trying persuade people who aren't fond of Kael. For the rest of us - fans and those willing to try her - this is a wonderful read. Kael's idiom was deceptively casual when she wrote, so these interviews aren't so far off from her critical writings. Her comments are often fascinating and intriguing, and she's so eloquent it's great to hear her all over again. Kael's the greatest film critic there's been, and as she wrote how she spoke, this book is a welcome addition to her oeuvre. Do read it.