Charlie P (Green Integer). This item is unavailable.Charlie P (Green Integer)

A lonely tune figure of the American manchild goes through adventures of an epic dimension. Author Richard Kalich offers a singularly unique, comic and outlandish Everyman - the kind of eternally adolescent man one sees on any American street corner - who, in his epic 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 perusing 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 hardly begun yet.

Akin to other great American icons, such as Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, Ring Lardner's Al and Forrest Gump, Charlie P plumbs the relation between fantasy and reality to offer readers a character both asocial and, at the same time, at the heart of the American Dream.