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Silver Light

David Thomson

$27.99

Paperback

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English
Kamera Books
01 October 2022
From 1865 to 1950, the multi-faceted world of the American West, its rich, colourful characters, and its many faces

historical, mythic, and cinematic

are captured in the story of a reclusive, elderly photographer and her friend, a writer of Western comic books.

Two characters dominate the novel's foreground: a Georgia O'Keeffe-like figure, photographer Susan Garth, shrewd, cantankerous, reclusive, and still self-reliant at 80, and her longtime friend Bark Blaylock, a western writer/filmmaker who may be Wyatt Earp's son. A subplot involves James Averill, a wealthy Easterner who sees his philandering as a frontiersman's quest for knowledge. As the time frame shuttles between 1950 and the late 1800s, we meet Susan's father, a gentlemanly cattle rancher who reads Thomas Hardy, and serves as a springboard to the Old West of Bat Masterson, Geronimo and Billy the Kid. The cast includes Willa Cather, Montgomery Clift, Charles Ives, Judge Roy Bean and numerous characters smuggled in from such movies as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Silver Light artfully juxtaposes the brimming frontier of legend against a construct of the West as a constricted wilderness of the soul.

'A fascinating novel. With its rich, handsome prose, this is a book to savor'

William Hjortsberg, New York Times

'Thomson's intricate, hypnotic history/romance about the Old West and how we have come to perceive it... Masterly'

Los Angeles Times

'Thomson's rangy metafictional collage blends figures from history and legend as well as characters from Hollywood films in an endlessly inventive cinematic meditation on the American West'

Publishers Weekly
By:  
Imprint:   Kamera Books
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm, 
ISBN:   9780857305022
ISBN 10:   0857305026
Pages:   384
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

English-American writer David Thomson was educated at Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. After seven years at Penguin Books, he became a Director of Film Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire between 1977 and 1981. Perhaps best known for his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is a prolific writer on film including biographies of David O Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood: Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.

Reviews for Silver Light

A fascinating novel. With its rich, handsome prose, this is a book to savor -- William Hjortsberg * New York Times * Thomson's intricate, hypnotic history/romance about the Old West and how we have come to perceive it... Masterly * Los Angeles Times * Thomson's rangy metafictional collage blends figures from history and legend as well as characters from Hollywood films in an endlessly inventive cinematic meditation on the American West * Publishers Weekly *


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