Jerome Charyn: The Catfish Man (USA 1981)

From the Publisher:
Like the Bronx River catfish, now extinct, Jerome Charyn figured he had to be slippery and tough to survive -- especially in the wacked-out world seen here through Jerome Charyn's imagination. In a "conjured life" of playful fact and fatalistic fantasy, he will follow the miscarriages of fortune from an ethnic citadel of the Bronx, to a Louisiana looney bin, to a Texas jail. He will battle for glory... as a Polish Baron street punk, NROTC cadet, ping-pong powerhouse, and caped bandito. He will surrender to romanee... with a topless-bottomless harpist, a talented shoplifter, and a beauteous, bigamous swamp girl. And after his headlong swim against the stream, our catfish man will finally reach his happy ending.

THE CATFISH MAN, "full of invention and lies, and true in the best possible way" (LOS ANGELES TIMES), is a "gaspingly hilarious and nightmarish memoir" (CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER) Charyn's "energetic, wisecracking style" and "cockeyed, marvelously idiosyncratic imagination" (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) make this his "most memorable book yet" (DALLAS MORNING NEWS).

Jerome Charyn: The Catfish Man. A Conjured Life. Avon Bard Books, ISBN: 0380561689 (November, 1981), 313 p., $3.50.