Jerome Charyn: Metropolis (USA 1987)

From the Publisher:
NEW YORK...
THE CANDIED APPLE
Discover the city of sweet dreams. The fast-beating heart of, a breathtaking world. The hopes and the hype; the glitter and the glamour; the promise of anything and everything

THE BAD APPLE
Get a taste of the low life and the high life. The wheelers and the dealers. The gaud and the fraud. From Wall Street to Fashion Avenue; from tough Bronx ghettos to the shrewd world of Soho art moguls.

THE FABULOUS BIG APPLE
Visit the sparkling city that never sleeps. From Ellis Island to Times Square; Hell's Kitchen to the kitchen at Gracie Mansion. Uptown, Downtown, Chinatown. A city of legends - and of astonishing truths behind the legends. Meet stars, politicians, movers and shakers. From His Honor the Mayor to Madonnia and Mickey Mantle. From Soho’s bad boy, Julian Schnabel, to Roxy, who built Radio City; Douglas Leigh, who lit up Broadway; and a sex-palace princess who called Spider Lady.

HERE IS NEW YORK...
from the heart!

Jerome Charyn: Metropolis. New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land. Arbor House, ISBN: 0380704013 (September, 1987), 304 p., $8.95.

Jerome Charyn: Metropolis (USA 1986)

From the Publisher:
"There's simply no writer currently practicing who has Charyn's incredible combination of wild imagination and iron control... we will be reading him along with the Bellows and the Updikes and the Faulkners and the Hemingways." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Now, in his first book of non-fiction, Jerome Charyn trains his novelist's eye on a phenomenon as elusive as it is alluring -- New York, New York. Like its inhabitants, New York City has no firm roots. It cannibalizes its past, swallowing up buildings, places, and concepts almost as soon as they are established.

In METROPOLIS, Jerome Charyn, whose parents both passed through Ellis Island, searches for the "history" the city loves to hide. Using himself as a persona and a camera eye, he digs into the complex folds of fabric that make up modern New York. He spends the Fourth of July with Mayor Koch; invades secret Mafia country in Brooklyn; attends Opening Day at Yankee Stadium with Mickey Mantle; tours the boroughs with parks commissioner Henry Stern (looking for graffiti); discusses racism, crime, and family roots with police commissioner Benjamin Ward; visits with SoHo art dealer Mary Boone; talks about Marlon Brando with the bad boy of painting, Julian Schnabel; reminisces with Douglas Leigh, the man who lit the Empire State Building; slips into a shelter for the homeless in the Bronx and wanders through a sex palace in Times Square; reveals a new generation of Chinese-Americans that destroys the old legend of Charlie Chan; probes the idea of Madonna as the ultimate Material Girl; and excavates...
[continued on the back flap]

Jerome Charyn: Metropolis. New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land. Putnam's, ISBN: 0399131337 (September, 1986), 304 p., $18.95.