Fiction. In CHARLIE P author Richard Kalich offers us a singularly unique, comic and outlandish Everyman. A looney-tune figure of the American manchild—the kind of eternally adolescent men one sees on any American street corner—who, in his episodic adventures through life, loses his penis, is completely dismembered, suffocated, starved and cut in half, yet continues to come back for more. At age three, when his father dies, he decides to overcome mortality by becoming immortal. By not living his life he will live forever. Whether he's pursuing the girl of his dreams or a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Charlie P ends up with no more than a peck on the cheek or robbed blind. Even when dead and called to Heaven for an accounting, he remains the eternal optimist. Now that he's dead and gone, he finally has a real chance at achieving his ends. He can start over. Having never lived his life, his life has not yet hardly begun. Akin to other great American icons such as Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Ring Lardner's Al, and Forrest Gump, CHARLIE P plumbs the relation between fantasy and reality to offer us a character both asocial and alienated and, at the same time, at the heart of the American Dream. "CHARLIE P is energetic, delightfully sardonic, dark without being oppressive, playful and very readable"—Sven Birkerts.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

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