The Silver Ghost

by Chuck Kinder

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.

Genres: Fiction

297 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Chuck Kinder was an American novelist. Kinder was a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught from 1980 until his retirement in 2014.

Reviews

[Il Pech · Rating 4 out of 5]

Romanzo molto americano, col protagonista che vuole fare una vita sulla strada ispirandosi a Kerouac e a James Dean.

niente di trascendentale ma un libro che si fa leggere volentieri dall'inizio alla fine.

un libro che, per spirito, stile e contenuti, è perfetto per la post adolescenza, da infilare tra Jack Frusciante e Welsh.

io l'ho scoperto tardi.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hey, you can also read this in English if you want! Check out Braddock Ave. Books to get a new edition!

It's great. A re-issue of one of his earliest novels, a must read in the Kinder cannon. Or any god damn cannon, hell put it in a canon and light up your backyard for a real thrill ... You get Chuck Kinder in a seemingly pure, unadulterated form. "Seemingly" because we all know how wrought over and crafted it really is. It's hard work to make writing read so effortlessly, but that is the genius of Mr. Kinder.

Funny, and also devastating at points. Can't go wrong reading it.

[Steev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wait a minute! Is Last Mountain Dancer a memoir by Chuck Kinder or a fake memoir about Jim Stark?