title: The Black Swan: A Memoir
author:  Jerome Charyn 
description: Picking up where his much-praised memoir <i><a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/031216808X/${0}">The Dark Lady from Belorusse</a></i> left off, Jerome Charyn continues the story of his childhood adventures in the Bronx. The year is 1949, and 11-year-old "Baby" (the nickname survived the 1947 arrival of younger brother Marve) regularly skips school to sneak off to a local movie theater, the Luxor. He's informally adopted by the theater's three eccentric owners, Bronx natives and classmates at Harvard who dropped out to purchase the Luxor and share a nearby apartment. Two of them pine for their former high school teacher, the married (and alcoholic) Mrs. Green, while the third burns with unrequited passion for a handsome fireman. Next, Baby connects with a local gangster, who sends him out to collect protection money from the area's businesses, ostensibly as payment for cases of celery tonic. The extensive stretches of dialogue are as colorful as the characters, and if it all seems a little too picturesque to be believable, well, the "Note to the Reader" does admit that the people, places, and events depicted "are the product of imaginative recreation." Who cares? Charyn's roistering account brings to life postwar New York City with such vividness and gusto that if it isn't true, it ought to be. <i>--Wendy Smith</i>
zlib_text: Black Swan Green
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Also by David Mitchell
  
  Ghostwritten
  
  number9dream
  
  Cloud Atlas
  
  ![](images/00025.jpg)
  
  
  Copyright © 2006 by David Mitchell
  
  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Hodder & StoughtonA division of
  Hodder Headline
  
  The right of David Mitchell to be identified as the Author of the Work has
  been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
  1988.
  
  A Sceptre Book
  
  1
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
  a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the
  prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any
  form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without
  a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
  
  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
  persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
  
  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
  