Audiobooks by Jerome Charyn

The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His Times

Raising the literary bar to a new level, Jerome Charyn re-creates the voice of Theodore Roosevelt, the New York City police commissioner, Rough Rider, and soon-to-be twenty-sixth president through his derring-do adventures, effortlessly combining superhero dialogue with haunting pathos. Beginning with his sickly childhood and concluding with McKinley's assassination, the novel positions Roosevelt as a 'perfect bull in a china shop,' a fearless crime fighter and pioneering environmentalist who would grow up to be our greatest peacetime president. With an operatic cast, including 'Bamie,' his handicapped older sister; Eleanor, his gawky little niece; as well as the devoted Rough Riders, the novel memorably features the lovable mountain lion Josephine, who helped train Roosevelt for his 'crowded hour,' the charge up San Juan Hill. Lauded by Jonathan Lethem for his 'polymorphous imagination and crack comic timing,' Charyn has created a classic of historical fiction, confirming his place as 'one of the most important writers in American literature' (Michael Chabon).

Jerome Charyn (Author), Danny Campbell (Narrator)

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Sergeant Salinger

J. D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American World War II draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war-from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a 'spook,' with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

Jerome Charyn (Author), David Colacci (Narrator)

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I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War

Tracing the historic arc of Abraham Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly young man in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews to the familiar Lincoln saga, seamlessly braiding Lincoln family members and military figures with a parade of fictional extras - wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, patriotic whores, and dying soldiers. Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln's own letters and speeches, Jerome Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons - Robert, Willie, and Tad - is explored with penetrating psychological insight, utmost compassion, and the most ingenious novelistic license. "The novel...succeeds in making the legendary figure more accessible, using Lincoln's lifelong battle with depression as an avenue through which to explore his life and perspective... A warts-and-all portrayal, not only of the lead, but of central supporting figures, most especially his tempestuous and difficult wife, Mary. Charyn has managed to craft a fictional autobiography that rings emotionally true." - Publishers Weekly

Jerome Charyn (Author), Arthur Morey (Narrator)

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Cesare: A Tale of War-Torn Berlin

On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him 'Cesare' after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr's enemies. Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin's Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her. Cesare is a literary thriller and a love story born of the horrors of a country whose culture has died, whose history has been warped, and whose soul has disappeared.

Jerome Charyn (Author), David Colacci (Narrator)

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