Charles Arrowsmith Journalist Profile

Articles

A fantastical exploration of the ache that comes with wanting the impossible

Dec 18, 2024 | latimes.com | Charles Arrowsmith

Book review How We Know Our Time Travelers: Stories By Anita FelicelliWTAW Press: 216 pages, $18.95If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. To desire the impossible is only human. Most of us have, at one time or another, wished to relive the moments when we were happiest, magically reshape the world as we would like it to be or even live forever.
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard review - ferociously readable

Sep 27, 2024 | thetimes.com | Charles Arrowsmith

There’s an episode in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 2021 novel The Morning Star that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror film. Ramsvik, a middle-aged politician, has suffered a stroke, which he survived, followed by another haemorrhage, which it appears he won’t. The decision is made to take him off life support; he’s declared dead and prepped to become an organ donor. A scalpel is drawn from his throat to his pubis. The doctor is handed a saw. But something’s amiss. Ramsvik’s eyes have opened.
Review | Ben Macintyre’s ‘The Siege’ vividly recounts a hostage crisis

Sep 20, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Charles Arrowsmith

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 ArrowsmithSeptember 20, 2024 at 12:56 p.m. EDTBy 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

Sep 2, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Charles Arrowsmith

Review by Charles ArrowsmithSeptember 2, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDTLife, 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?

Jul 4, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Charles Arrowsmith

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

Jun 10, 2024 | latimes.com | Charles Arrowsmith

Book Review The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir By Griffin DunnePenguin Press: 400 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Life’s what you make it, especially when times are hard.
Review | Four books to read for Pride Month

Jun 8, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Charles Arrowsmith

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

Apr 13, 2024 | latimes.com | Charles Arrowsmith

Book review Thorn Tree By Max LudingtonSt. Martin’s Press: 400 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. 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.
Review | A literary sensation who hit it big at 21 grapples with his status

Mar 6, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Charles Arrowsmith

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

Feb 26, 2024 | yahoo.com | Charles Arrowsmith

“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.