Charles Arrowsmith
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Articles by Charles Arrowsmith
Collapse by Édouard Louis review – coming to terms with a brother’s death
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Collapse by Édouard Louis review – coming to terms with a brother’s death
At 33, the French writer Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy (2017), and again in Change (2024), he wrote about being the promising child of a poor family, the bullied gay son who became a bestselling author.
‘The Gods of New York’ draws a line from the late 1980s to now
‘The Gods of New York’ draws a line from the late 1980s to now (washingtonpost.com) ‘The Gods of New York’ draws a line from the late 1980s to now By Charles Arrowsmith 2025091116225000 The never-ending battle for the soul of New York City is a dependable subject for nonfiction writers.
La era dorada de Hollywood bajo la lupa: censura, guiños ocultos y la energía queer que sobrevivió a la represión
¿Qué es exactamente el “cine queer” y cómo deberíamos entenderlo hoy? Michael Koresky ha dedicado gran parte de su carrera a responder a esta pregunta. Como curador de la serie Queersighted de Criterion Channel, ha arrojado nueva luz sobre los temas LGBTQ+ al yuxtaponer joyas raramente vistas del cine mundial con películas más famosas, tanto esperadas (Mulholland Drive) como menos (Addams Family Values).
How censors tried — and failed — to keep LGBT voices out of the movies
How censors tried — and failed — to keep LGBT voices out of the movies (washingtonpost.com) How censors tried — and failed — to keep LGBT voices out of the movies By Charles Arrowsmith 2025070813003900 What exactly is "queer cinema" — and how should we understand it today? Michael Koresky has devoted much of his career to answering this question.
‘Great Black Hope’ proves Rob Franklin has something to say
‘Great Black Hope’ proves Rob Franklin has something to say (washingtonpost.com) ‘Great Black Hope’ proves Rob Franklin has something to say By Charles Arrowsmith 2025061015000300 "Great Black Hope," a promising debut novel by Rob Franklin, opens with its leading man being arrested for cocaine possession.
A treasure trove of new books to read during Pride Month
A treasure trove of new books to read during Pride Month (washingtonpost.com) A treasure trove of new books to read during Pride Month By Charles Arrowsmith 2025060514004400 The dazzling variety of current and upcoming books on LGBTQ themes is a reassuring reminder of how far we've come. This year, fans of queer romance can read books set in the worlds of Formula 1 ("Crash Test"), clandestine Victorian clubs ("To Sketch a Scandal") and Italian restaurants ("Pasta Girls").
Meghan Daum prided herself on candor. Then the invites stopped coming
Everyone has a friend who likes to tell it how it really is. They wear their iconoclasm like a badge of pride. They’re the contrarian at the party who delights in puncturing polite shibboleths, unafraid to take on even their own tribes in pursuit of a deeper truth. Real talk, for them, is the only honest and authentic kind of dialogue. Meghan Daum is a fully paid-up member of the real-talk brigade.
The simple life beckons in 'The Colony.' Enlightenment is not forthcoming
Burnout’s nothing new. Just ask Henry David Thoreau, who was lamenting in 1854 that our lives are being “frittered away by detail.” The smartphone may then have been unimaginable — Alexander Graham Bell was barely out of infancy —yet the impulse to reach for it was already there. “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.” Thoreau’s solution?
One queer man's approach to hardship in 21st-century America? Humor and optimism
When he was 16, Edgar Gomez had gleaming new veneers glued to his top teeth. His freshly even smile was like a miracle: “I looked like the real me,” he writes, “not that other, shame-filled version of me I'd been living as before.” Despite wondering how he might pay for their upkeep, Gomez believed suddenly that “money would never be a problem again.
Review | Ben Macintyre’s ‘The Siege’ vividly recounts a hostage crisis
Armed police on May 5, 1980, during the violent end to a six-day hostage crisis at the Iranian Embassy in London. (AP) Review by Charles Arrowsmith September 20, 2024 at 12:56 p.m. EDT By chance, it happened during prime time. After six days of urgent negotiations and rising tension, everything came to a sudden boil. The BBC interrupted a tense snooker final that had attracted some 14 million viewers to show it. Explosions, smoke, fire.
Review | Garth Greenwell’s ‘Small Rain’ is a timeless work
Review by Charles Arrowsmith September 2, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT Life, what one might call the body plot, defies the traditional rules of storytelling. There’s no art or logic to it: sickness blindsides us; the end is often sudden. Though we may refer to everyday misfortunes as tragedies or acts of God, “stuff happens” is hardly Aristotle. Nor are our bodies vessels for morality tales; suffering is defiantly meaningless.
Review | What can we learn by trying to live like the Founding Fathers?
How, in the Year of Our Crisis 2024, do we feel about the Founding Fathers? For many Americans, they are inspirational figures deserving of uncomplicated reverence — the creators of modern liberal democracy. For others, they’re the monsters who prolonged slavery in the United States, the chauvinists who excluded women from the franchise and the morons whose rules would grant as many senators to Wyoming as California, despite its having one sixty-eighth of the population.
Griffin Dunne's memoir shows a life of privilege and misadventure haunted by his sister's murder
Life’s what you make it, especially when times are hard. For example: It’s past midnight and you’ve come to SoHo to see a woman you met in a diner but she’s not everything she seemed and you can’t afford the subway home because your money flew out the taxi window on the ride downtown so you bum around but end up getting mistaken for a burglar and then the woman from the diner overdoses and before you know it you’re being chased by a mob of punks led by a vigilante driving a Mister Softee truck.
Review | Four books to read for Pride Month
It’s summer, it’s Pride Month, and there are more good books to choose from than there are sequins at a drag race. Queer fiction’s on a tear right now, with big titles coming soon from Alan Hollinghurst, Garth Greenwell and Casey McQuiston. Miranda July’s “All Fours,” out last month, has already made Washington Post critic Ron Charles blush and turned Greenwell giddy with admiration. There’s also brilliant work from new and rising authors. Meredith Talusan wrote glowingly in these pages of Alana S.
Reckoning with long shadow of 1960s counterculture
The long shadow of the 1960s looms over “Thorn Tree,” a sprawling second novel by Brooklyn-based author Max Ludington. Set largely in Los Angeles in 2017, the book concerns two baby boomers dealing with the fallout from their countercultural pasts. It’s a novel of regrets and reckonings, traumas repressed and returning.
Review | A literary sensation who hit it big at 21 grapples with his status
Halfway through “Change,” our hero Eddy Bellegueule, still a teen, goes to a lecture by the sociologist Didier Eribon about his book “Returning to Reims.” Though the speaker is nearly four decades his senior, Eddy finds himself strongly identifying with Didier’s story. Both men come from impoverished industrial towns in northern France. They’re both gay. Didier’s experiences of class violence, homophobia and shame sound like Eddy’s own.
'The Bloodied Nightgown' is a monument to Joan Acocella's savage wit and unsentimental generosity Original
“I do think I know a hot dog from a real artist,” Joan Acocella observed modestly last year. Few would disagree. Watching her tell them apart, with an occasional blast of her savage wit, was a treat for readers for four decades. Sadly, the publication of her new collection, “The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays,” comes just weeks after her death Jan. 7 at age 78.
An alternate history of Mexican conquest, with a Tarantino-ready twist
Nobody knows exactly what happened in the days and months after Spanish soldiers crossed the flower-trimmed causeway into Tenochtitlan to meet the Aztec emperor in 1519.
Una historia alternativa de la conquista mexicana, con un giro listo para Tarantino
Nadie sabe exactamente qué ocurrió en los días y meses posteriores a que los soldados españoles cruzaran la calzada adornada de flores hacia Tenochtitlán para encontrarse con el emperador azteca en 1519.
Book World: An alternate history of Mexican conquest, with a Tarantino-ready twist
By Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer Riverhead. 240 pp. $28 - - - Nobody knows exactly what happened in the days and months after Spanish soldiers crossed the flower-trimmed causeway into Tenochtitlan to meet the Aztec emperor in 1519.
Review | An alternate history of Mexican conquest, with a Tarantino-ready twist
Comment Save Nobody knows exactly what happened in the days and months after Spanish soldiers crossed the flower-trimmed causeway into Tenochtitlan to meet the Aztec emperor in 1519.
Book World: 'Blackouts' returns an erotic charge to a historical record
- - - Before the Kinsey Institute, there was the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants. In 1941, that group published the landmark report "Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns," which contained analysis of 80 case histories. It made for remarkable reading: a frank, vivid record of early-20th-century sexuality. Though its author, George W.
Sensei Schwarzenegger? The Governator attempts a reboot with a pallid self-help book
Bodybuilder, movie star, politician: Arnold Schwarzenegger has played many roles. Now 76, the five-time Terminator becomes a first-time Tony Robbins with the publication of his self-help book, “Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life.” This “fourth act,” he says, is a byproduct of the “failure and redemption and reinvention” that followed the end of his California governorship and the breakdown of his marriage to Maria Shriver.
Apocalipsis, chamanismo e intentos de revertir la muerte: cómo es lo nuevo de Karl Ove Knausgård
El humo de los incendios forestales de Canadá dio a los cielos del norte de Estados Unidos un tono infernal el pasado mes de junio. Se sacaron las máscaras, el Índice de Calidad del Aire tuvo su momento y Times Square se pareció brevemente a Los Ángeles de Blade Runner. Para los lectores de la novela apocalíptica de Karl Ove Knausgårdde 2021, La estrella de la mañana, la situación podría haberles resultado extrañamente familiar.
Knausgaard is back, with a compulsively readable new novel
Smoke from wildfires in Canada lent skies across the northern United States an infernal hue this past June. Masks were dug out; the Air Quality Index had its moment; Times Square looked briefly like the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner.” For readers of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s apocalyptic 2021 novel, “The Morning Star,” the situation might have seemed ominously familiar.
Review | Knausgaard is back, with a compulsively readable new novel Original
Smoke from wildfires in Canada lent skies across the northern United States an infernal hue this past June. Masks were dug out; the Air Quality Index had its moment; Times Square looked briefly like the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner.” For readers of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s apocalyptic 2021 novel, “The Morning Star,” the situation might have seemed ominously familiar.
Review: Peter Moore's "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" Original
(Illustration by Peter Strain for The Washington Post, based on photos from Library of Congress; Alamy) The unexpected influencers behind America’s independence Peter Moore’s ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ introduces us to a cast beyond the Founding Fathers Review by Charles Arrowsmith June 30, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EDT Comment on this story Comment “Since the identity of the United States as a nation remains unusually fluid and elusive, we Americans have had to look back...
Book World: Bite off a hunk of history with one of these new books
Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post May 24, 2023 As a child, I couldn't understand why my parents always took biographies of French presidents or memoirs by mountaineers on holiday when a sensible traveler would surely prefer "Evil Under the Sun" by Agatha Christie. Now I get it. Forget beach reads; vacations are the best time to bite off a serious hunk of history. Here are four new books that offer something to think about as you wait for your plane, your train or the end of the summer rain. 1.
Bite off a hunk of history with one of these new books
You might be aware that Marlene Dietrich slept with JFK, but did you know about Bing Crosby’s role in a CIA plot to blackmail the president of Indonesia? James Risen’s “The Last Honest Man” contains this and other volcanic gossip that might never have scorched the congressional record had it not been for the eponymous Sen. Frank Church. In 1975, the Idaho Democrat led a congressional committee to uncover government and corporate corruption and overreach.
Review | Dreaming of a fresh start? Be careful what you wish for. Original
Most of us have run away from ourselves at some point, maybe even spiraled in a foreign city. If you haven’t, may you one day do so with the same self-delusional brio as the protagonist of “Berlin,” Bea Setton’s highly entertaining debut novel. In the course of this witty and unsettling romp, Setton locates the humor and pathos in personal crisis while nimbly sidestepping the perils of the coming-of-age travelogue.
Book World: In Jinwoo Chong's debut novel, 'Flux,' there's a lot going on
- - - In the Back to the Future movie trilogy, Marty McFly travels through time with the help of a Y-shaped gizmo called the flux capacitor. Its function receives only a cursory explanation, but it doesn't really matter how it works; the movie is less about the mechanics of time travel than the relationship between the past and the present, and the effect we can have on shaping our own destiny.
Proust’s Death Was An Ending But Not The End
One hundred years ago, on Nov. 18, 1922, Marcel Proust breathed his last in Paris at age 51. His death, from pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess, was perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the belle epoque, an age of gentility, civility and artistic achievement that had mostly ended with the outbreak of World War I. At the time, several volumes of Proust’s gargantuan, seven-part novel, “À la recherche du temps perdu” (“In Search of Lost Time”), had yet to be published.
Proust's death, 100 years ago, was an ending but not the end
One hundred years ago, on Nov. 18, 1922, Marcel Proust breathed his last in Paris at age 51. His death, from pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess, was perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the belle epoque, an age of gentility, civility and artistic achievement that had mostly ended with the outbreak of World War I. At the time, several volumes of Proust's gargantuan, seven-part novel, "À la recherche du temps perdu" (" In Search of Lost Time "), had yet to be published.
Book World: Hua Hsu's 'Stay True' questions the meaning of a senseless tragedy
- - - The murder of a college friend lies at the heart of Hua Hsu's memoir "Stay True." The friend, referred to in the book only as Ken, was shot dead at 20 years old in Vallejo, Calif., early one Sunday morning in July 1998, after a party in Berkeley. It was "a freak occurrence," an inept robbery that devolved into violence, and Ken's assailants were quickly apprehended and jailed.
Five Reasons to Love Bret Easton Ellis Online
It’s boring to call Bret Easton Ellis “controversial.” Yeah, American Psycho was once the subject of NOW boycotts and mock-distress middlebrow brouhaha. True, Ellis’s work traffics in the sort of content — sexual, violent, linguistic — that falls firmly into the NSFW category.
Review: A memoirist 'phenomene' is France's answer to Knausgaard - minus the narcissism
In his incandescent autofiction, Édouard Louis has remade his painful youth as literature, and in doing so has become one of his country’s most famous literary exports. His debut, “The End of Eddy,” was a hardscrabble portrait of growing up gay and poor in northern France. He has explored this milieu in three subsequent volumes, including “A Woman’s Battles and Transformations,” now available in Tash Aw’s English version.
In 'Burning Questions,' Margaret Atwood ponders an astonishing array of subjects
“Burning Questions” is a canny title for Margaret Atwood’s new book of essays and occasional pieces. It reflects both the urgency of the issues dear to her — literature, feminism, the environment, human rights — and their combustibility, the risk that in writing about them she might get burned.
On May 10, 1869, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad was marked at a ceremony on high ground in Utah. "The great men, those architects of American progress, [David] Hewes and [Leland] Stanford, delivered speeches," writes Jonathan Evison in his epic new novel, "Small World." "They spoke of overcoming the impossible and of shrinking the world one track at a time.
Jonathan Evison's 'Small World' feels like a big statement about America
(Alla Dreyvitser/The Washington Post/iStock) On May 10, 1869, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad was marked at a ceremony on high ground in Utah. "The great men, those architects of American progress, [David] Hewes and [Leland] Stanford, delivered speeches," writes Jonathan Evison in his epic new novel, "Small World." "They spoke of overcoming the impossible and of shrinking the world one track at a time.
NYPL's Best Books of 2021: Accessible Versions with BARD & Bookshare Links
The New York Public Library is pleased to announce its Best Books of 2021 for kids, teens, and adults! Many of these books are available in one or more accessible formats, as linked below. If you find it hard to read standard print, The New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Library provides free access to talking books, talking book players, braille, a talking book download website and a free talking book and e-braille app for mobile devices. Learn more and apply.
In Will Smith's memoir, the superstar is self-deprecating but ultimately invincible
In 1996, days after "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" ended and shortly before "Independence Day" almost destroyed the Earth, Will Smith went to the opening of Planet Hollywood in Sydney to seek the advice of Arnold Schwarzenegger. What was the key to his pharaonic success? "Think of yourself as a politician running for Biggest Movie Star in the World," replied Arnie. Smith was an excellent student.
Will Smith's memoir is self-deprecating but ultimately he's invincible
Will Smith stars in “Bad Boys for Life.” Photo: Washington Post / Columbia Pictures In 1996, days after “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” ended and shortly before “Independence Day” almost destroyed the Earth, Will Smith went to the opening of Planet Hollywood in Sydney to seek the advice of Arnold Schwarzenegger. What was the key to his pharaonic success? “Think of yourself as a politician running for Biggest Movie Star in the World,” replied Arnie. Smith was an excellent student.
Tom McCarthy's 'The Making of Incarnation' is a mind-bending international caper
If you've ever tried counting sheep and found yourself, rather than dropping off, wondering if there might be some kind of design underpinning the leaps and bleats of your woolly friends, Tom McCarthy's new book might be for you. " The Making of Incarnation," the British writer's fifth novel, is an investigation of pattern and connection set in the world of motion studies. And lest that sound dry, rest assured it also asks such big questions as how can you fake zero-gravity love-making onscreen?
Book World: In Will Smith's memoir, the superstar is self-deprecating but ultimately invincible
In 1996, days after “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” ended and shortly before “Independence Day” almost destroyed the Earth, Will Smith went to the opening of Planet Hollywood in Sydney to seek the advice of Arnold Schwarzenegger. What was the key to his pharaonic success? “Think of yourself as a politician running for Biggest Movie Star in the World,” replied Arnie. Smith was an excellent student.
In Will Smith's memoir, superstar is self-deprecating but ultimately invincible
By Charles Arrowsmith Special to the Washington Post In 1996, days after “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” ended and shortly before “Independence Day” almost destroyed the Earth, Will Smith went to the opening of Planet Hollywood in Sydney to seek the advice of Arnold Schwarzenegger. What was the key to his pharaonic success? “Think of yourself as a politician running for Biggest Movie Star in the World,” Schwarzenegger replied. Smith was an excellent student.
'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood': Tarantino pulp fiction as a novel
By Charles Arrowsmith The Washington Post Updated July 6, 2021 6:00 AM ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD: A NOVEL by Quentin Tarantino (Harper Perennial, 400 pp., $9.99) Two years after "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" hit theaters, Quentin Tarantino has novelized his Oscar-winning movie, calling the result a "complete rethinking" of the story. Repackaging, cynics might think, but that's not quite right: The book is a distinct experience — rangier, sexier, bloodier.
Review | Quentin Tarantino turned his last movie into a novel, but don’t think you know the ending
Two years after “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” hit theaters, Quentin Tarantino has novelized his Oscar-winning movie, calling the result a “complete rethinking” of the story. Repackaging, cynics might think. But that’s not quite right: The book is a distinct experience — rangier, sexier, bloodier. More wistful, and somewhat more oblique in meaning, it expands the film’s world even as it comments upon it.
Review | With ‘Double Blind,’ Edward St. Aubyn tasks himself with a formidable challenge
There’s a reason that curious beast the novel of ideas is rarely captured alive. It isn’t easy to animate complex notions using only the standard tools of character and plot without the whole enterprise collapsing beneath the weight of exegesis. In his new novel, “Double Blind,” Edward St. Aubyn sets himself that formidable challenge: to explore weighty subjects like biodiversity, schizophrenia and venture capitalism while probing the nature of consciousness and the limits of science.
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