Description
Book SynopsisApple Books • Best Books of the Month
A
Publishers Weekly Summer Reads Selection
Narrated by a starry-eyed lesbian,
Big Red reimagines the tragic career of Rita Hayworth and her indomitable husband, Orson Welles.
Trade Review"Cinematic and bittersweet...[Charyn] subtly evokes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 'The Great Gatsby' in telling his saga of star-crossed charismatics through the eyes of an all-seeing peripheral figure, an outsider-insider named Rusty Redburn... His novel, with its multiple layers of fiction and fact, resurrects the vanished world it celebrates and explicates it in all its grand illusion." -- Tom Nolan - Wall Street Journal
"Written with love and affection for its subject,
Big Red is an entrancing work of historical fiction that serves as a glimpse into Rita Hayworth’s life far beyond her stardom. Big Red serves as a long-form love letter from author Jerome Charyn to Hayworth (nicknamed Big Red by Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn), through the eyes of our narrator, a fictional character named Rusty Redburn, a self-proclaimed 'actress who couldn’t act, a dancer who couldn’t dance, and a singer who couldn’t sing....' Using Rusty as narrator serves as a successful framing device for the story, as her perspective affords readers a behind-the-scenes glance at two of the most beguiling figures of mid-20th century American cinema. Her descriptions are vivid, humorous, and perceptive... Charyn’s love for film history shines through." -- David Vogel - Chicago Review of Books
"Jerome Charyn... does a bang-up job of capturing Hayworth through the eyes of a second-rate gossip columnist: her rise to stardom, her tempestuous marriage to Welles, and her incredible performances in movies like
Gilda and
The Lady from Shanghai. If you can’t decide between a book or a classic movie, Charyn’s got just the ticket for you." -- Lisa Levy - CrimeReads
"One of the supreme strengths of
Big Red is that Jerome Charyn finds exactly the right voice for the novel in Rusty Redburn, a cinephile and double agent hired by Harry Cohn to spy on the couple even as she falls in love with them... Mr. Charyn does not merely present what a reader might already know about Welles and Hayworth; instead, what we know, and don’t know, is angled through Rusty’s exquisite sensibility." -- Carl Rollyson - New York Sun
"[An] affecting and searing portrait of Silver Screen superstars.... Charyn offers rapid-fire dialogue and slapstick action (“So it’s a bit of blackmail,” Orson says at one point, “lunging” at an adversary though he “wasn’t much of a gladiator with his big flat feet”) along with affecting character development. It’s a rewarding paean to some of cinema’s greats." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Charyn strikes Tinseltown gold.... Rusty is, indeed, a 'pipperoo,' as Welles calls her, functioning as not just the novel's narrator but also its conscience...
Big Red is manna to fans of Old Hollywood, with Rusty, as Charyn's mouthpiece, riffing eloquently on key films on Hayworth's and Welles's résumés." -- Nell Beram, Shelf Awareness, starred review
