Big Red Audiobook By Jerome Charyn cover art

Big Red

A Novel Starring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles

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Big Red

By: Jerome Charyn
Narrated by: Natalie Duke
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About this listen

Since he first appeared on the American literary scene, Jerome Charyn has dazzled audiences with his "blunt, brilliantly crafted prose" (Washington Post). Yet Charyn, a beloved comedic novelist, also possesses an extraordinary knowledge of Golden Age Hollywood, having taught film history both in the United States and France.

With Big Red, Charyn reimagines the life of one of America's most enduring icons, "Gilda" herself, Rita Hayworth, whose fiery red tresses and hypnotic dancing graced the silver screen over sixty times in her nearly forty-year career. The quintessential movie star of the 1940s, Hayworth has long been objectified as a sex symbol, pin-up girl, and so-called Love Goddess. Here Charyn, channeling the ghosts of a buried past, finally lifts the veils that have long enshrouded Hayworth, evoking her emotional complexity—her passions, her pain, and her inner turmoil.

Reanimating such classic films as Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai, Big Red is a bittersweet paean to Hollywood's Golden Age, a tender yet honest portrait of a time before blockbusters and film franchises—one that promises to consume both Hollywood cinephiles and neophytes alike. Lauded for his "polymorphous imagination" (Jonathan Lethem), Charyn once again has created one of the most inventive novels in recent American literature.

©2022 Jerome Charyn (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Biographical Fiction Fiction Women's Fiction
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Hollywood history

Movie buffs like me will enjoy this factionalized look back at Hollywood in the 1940s - ‘50s, The plot is really just a recounting of events in the lives of Rita Hayworth and Orson Wells, so there isn’t much of a story per se. The narrator was excellent and really made the characters come back to life.

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