{"id":1030,"date":"2005-10-18T14:27:13","date_gmt":"2005-10-18T18:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2005\/10\/18\/jerome-charyn-guest-author\/"},"modified":"2010-12-20T14:29:44","modified_gmt":"2010-12-20T18:29:44","slug":"jerome-charyn-guest-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2005\/10\/18\/jerome-charyn-guest-author\/","title":{"rendered":"Jerome Charyn’s Isaac Babel Shortlist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"charyn.gif\"Jerome Charyn<\/A> has long been one of my favorite novelists, and when I found out that he’d just published a biography of Isaac Babel—Savage Shorthand<\/I><\/A>—I wondered if he might have some recommendations for readers who, like me, aren’t yet familiar with Babel’s stories. He very kindly sent the following note:<\/p>\n

\n

“Babel’s ‘Guy de Maupassant’ is my favorite story in the whole world; it’s funny and sad, and it’s the most telling story ever written about language and all its tricks and traps.<\/p>\n

“My next best favorite is ‘The King,’ about the Odessa gangster Benya Krik and his magical orange pants.<\/p>\n

“Readers should also look at ‘Di Grasso,’ a story about the mysteries and sometimes sordid magic of art.<\/p>\n

“I would then suggest a look at Babel’s 1920 Diary, which is his own portrait of the artist as a young man, an artist under enemy fire.<\/p>\n

“Now the reader is ready to look at Red Cavalry<\/I><\/A> and its curious ride through Poland, with all the savagery and bump-bump of the human heart.<\/p>\n

“And lastly, the reader should look at ‘Benya Krik,’ Babel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s screenplay about Benya, but from the point of view of a Soviet writer who has to wind his way through Soviet politics, which has already become a deadly maze.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Charyn has also recently edited Inside the Hornet’s Head<\/I><\/A>, which starts with his love for Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March<\/I> and goes on to include eightteen other great Jewish-American writers, ranging from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Leonard Cohen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jerome Charyn has long been one of my favorite novelists, and when I found out that he’d just published a biography of Isaac Babel—Savage Shorthand—I wondered if he might have some recommendations for readers who, like me, aren’t yet familiar with Babel’s stories. He very kindly sent the following note: “Babel’s ‘Guy de Maupassant’ is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}