Pop-Up Book Group with Jerome Charyn: BIG RED

Narrated by a starry-eyed lesbian, BIG RED reimagines the tragic career of Rita Hayworth and her indomitable husband, Orson Welles.

With BIG RED, Jerome 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.

Event Venue

Private Home, Manhattan (address will be sent to registrants one week before book group) and simultaneously online (Zoom), TO BE ANNOUNCED, NEW YORK, United States