{"product_id":"9780871404893","title":"Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003eBrooklyn is dead. Long live the Bronx! In Bitter Bronx, Jerome Charyn returns to his roots and leads the literary renaissance of an oft-overlooked borough in this surprising new collection.In Bitter Bronx, one of our most gifted and original novelists depicts a world before and after modern urban renewal destroyed the gritty sanctity of a land made famous by Ruth, Gehrig, and Joltin' Joe.Bitter Bronx is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with Jerome Charyn's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a \"land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders.\"In \"Lorelei,\" a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in \"Archy and Mehitabel\" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in \"Major Leaguer\" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories—\"Silk \u0026amp; Silk,\" \"Little Sister,\" and \"Marla\"—Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly \"New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches\" (John Leonard, New York Times).Throughout it all looms the \"master builder\" Robert Moses, a man who believed he could \"save\" the Bronx by building a highway through it, dynamiting whole neighborhoods in the process. Bitter Bronx stands as both a fictional eulogy for the people and places paved over by Moses' expressway and an affirmation of Charyn's \"brilliant imagination\" (Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Liveright Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47008771080432,"sku":"9780871404893","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780871404893_p0.jpg?v=1763828874","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780871404893","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}