The Silver Ghost

Price: $16.95

Item #00026 The Silver Ghost. Chuck Kinder.

Place Published: Braddock, PA
Publisher: Braddock Avenue Books
Date Published: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 9780692687123

Synopsis:

Called “the mighty Sasquatch of American Fiction” by Michael Chabon, renowned literary outlaw Chuck Kinder steps once again onto the landscape of American letters with the paperback reissue of his 1979 novel, The Silver Ghost. Available from Braddock Avenue Books, June 2016.

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.

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