A Loaded Gun - by Jerome Charyn (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A passionate and deeply researched reassessment of Emily Dickinson's life and singular legacy in American arts and letters

We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote:

My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun--
...
Though I than He-- may longer live
He longer must--than I--
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today.

Review Quotes

Praise for A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century

Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award Short List
PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist
Firecracker Award Finalist
O, The Oprah Magazine "Best Books of Summer" selection
Longreads "Best of the Year: Most Popular Exclusives" selection

"Remarkable insight . . . [a] unique meditation/investigation. . . . Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these." -Joyce Carol Oates

"A magnetic nonfiction reevaluation of the mystifying, radical, perhaps bisexual, and maybe greatest-ever American poet." --O, The Oprah Magazine

"In A Loaded Gun, [Charyn] is again out to release Dickinson from the myths that have enclosed her. . . . With essayistic chapters on Dickinson's mother, her dog, her servants, her photographic image, her poetic fragments--Charyn's book is perhaps best viewed as yet another imaginative attempt to get to the source of Dickinson's emotional intensity, and to imagine an 'Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century.'" --New York Review of Books

"[Emily Dickinson] will blow the top of your head off, no matter what century you live in. Charyn looks at a lot of ways to see this revolutionary, subversive, explosive genius." --Philadelphia Inquirer

"Ecstatic. . . . [Charyn] may be the perversely perfect critic for the poet who wandered 'The House of Supposition -- / The Glimmering Frontier that / Skirts the Acres of Perhaps--.'" --VICE magazine

"Charyn is a man, a New Yorker, living in the twenty-first century, yet he understands this female rebel from New England like no one else can." --Scranton Examiner

"A Loaded Gun is an invitation to meet Dickinson on the dizzyingly high ground of her imagination from a fellow writer who has done just that with his own writing." --Bay Area Reporter

"A postmodernism-flavored study of Emily Dickinson's life and work. . . . [A] lively reassessment [with] vivid commentary." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A writer obsessed with the Belle of Amherst imagines her rich, sensual inner life. . . . Charyn's ardent sleuthing yields a daring portrait of the elusive 'enchantress' and her world." --Kirkus Reviews

"[Charyn's] inviting prose allows readers with any degree of expertise on the life and work of Dickinson an entryway into her innovative, marvelous poetry." --Library Journal

"A celebrated master of literary voice, Charyn inhabits Dickinson from the first page. . . . [A Loaded Gun] is a gratifying nut of poetic analysis, historical psychology, and the passionate homage of a lifelong disciple of the beloved Belle of Amherst." --Historical Novels Review

"An intense work of literary scholarship. . . . [H]ighly recommended." --Midwest Book Review

"In A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn penetrates to the heart of Emily Dickinson, commonly thought to be a gifted but withdrawn spinster. He explores the 'demon' in her, the 'predator, ' and should make readers go back to her poetry with a new understanding of why she still works her spell in our time." --Herbert Gold, author of Still Alive: A Temporary Condition and Fathers Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems

"Jerome Charyn's A Loaded Gun is a staggeringly brilliant meditation on Emily Dickinson's life an

About the Author

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Maria La Divina; Ravage & Son; Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; 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. 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.