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 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and 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. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Culture at the American University of Paris, 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 Manhattan.
[The Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God; My Book, The Movie: Big Red; Q&A with Jerome Charyn; The Page 69 Test: Ravage & Son; Writers Read: Jerome Charyn (August 2023); My Book, The Movie: Maria La Divina]
At Lit Hub Charyn tagged "five of [his] favorite books about the lives of divas." One title on the list:
Annie Zaleski, Lady Gaga: ApplauseRead about another entry on the list.
Lady Gaga never stands in one place. She’s always on the move. She’s much more intelligent than most pop artists. She sings, she dances, she writes songs, models clothes, and she acts, each with a novel twist. We can’t take our eyes off her.She casts us in a hypnotic spell. She can sing hard rock and then do ballads with Tony Bennett.
Lady Gaga is a singer-entrepreneur, who inherited some of her skills from her parents, both of whom had businesses of their own. Born Stefani Germanotta on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she would explode on the rock scene as a most unusual icon, according to Zaleski. She suffered her own misfortunes, was taunted by her fellow high school students as a misfit and was sexually assaulted by her first producer when she was only nineteen. But Stefani survived and morphed into Lady Gaga.
“I want people to feel invaded when I sing. It’s very confrontational.” That’s one of the reasons she wears outrageous costumes whenever she performs, like a rhino horn on her forehead, or an outfit that turns her into an Alice in Wonderland teacup. There’s also another side to her art—she’s never confrontational with her fans. “They are the kings. They are the queens. They write the history of the kingdom, while I am something of a devoted jester.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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