Description
Fiction. Jimbo Stark, teenage soldier of fortune, loves, fights, drinks, mopes, and steals his way through this brilliant novel of the late 1950s. His America glows with an almost romantic light—it is an electric, song-filled garden for teenage love, where everything is possible, even heroism. Imagining himself sometimes as James Dean's reincarnation, sometimes as a beatnik gangster poet straight out of Jack Kerouac, Jimbo lives a legend of his own construction. THE SILVER GHOST is a wonderful novel of coming of age in America—letter perfect in its evocation of an almost mythical time, and powerfully affecting in its portrait of its hero. In a dazzlingly shifting series of set-pieces, flashbacks, and reveries, Chuck Kinder cuts back and forth from caper to sentiment to myth, from self-pity to self-mockery. With deft comic sense, a complex and winning hero, and a supporting cast of vividly realized characters, Kinder writes about Jimbo Stark with the same mixture of fond memory and relief that it's over that we all have toward that time when we, too, were perfectly seventeen; he makes THE SILVER GHOST one of the very best—and most sensationally written—novels of adolescence.
Author Bio
Chuck Kinder is the author of novels Snakehunter, THE SILVER GHOST (Braddock Avenue Books, 2016), and Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, a memoir, Last Mountain Dancer, and the poetry collections All That Yellow and IMAGINATION MOTEL (Six Gallery Press, 2014). A native of West Virginia, he has been a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Davis and the University of Alabama. A long-time professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, he now lives in Key Largo with his wife, Diane Cecily.
Author City: KEY LARGO, FL USA