Secret Isaac

Dermott McBride was a James Joyce scholar who went on to become overlord of every pimp in Manhattan. Isaac Sidel wanted to break his toes for scarring young prostitute Annie Powell, but first he had to sort out the small matter of a corrupt New York police commissioner.

'Charyn has trained his prose and makes it perform tricks. It's a New York prose, street smart, sly and full of lurches, like a series of subway stops on the way to hell' New York Times 'He writes like greased lightning' Time Out 'The sentences clip along at a pace that makes MTV seem slow ... a satiric hothouse of fast talk and low life' Washington Post 'Jerome Charyn is a realist of the urban nightmare' Chicago Tribune

Jerome Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937, and is the author of more than thirty books, including Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace And Magical Land and The Black Swan. He has lived in Barcelona, Houston, Austin and San Francisco and now divides his time between New York and Paris, where he teaches film theory at the American University and writes regularly for Cahiers du Cinema.