Dominic Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.His new novel is The Electric Hotel.
From Smith's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Electric Hotel?Visit Dominic Smith's website.
A: One of the things I'm interested in as a writer is what I think of as the gaps and silences of history. So when the Library of Congress put out a report about five years ago saying that more than 75 percent of all silent films have been lost forever, I was intrigued.
I kept wondering whether there was a lost masterpiece in all this vanished celluloid. And as I started to research the world of early silent film, I discovered that America’s first movie town was Fort Lee, New Jersey, not Hollywood, and that some landmark films were made before World War I.
This was the seed of the book, which tells the story of a lost silent film that ruined the famous French director and actress who made it. It also tells the story of the rise and fall of...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre.
The Page 69 Test: Bright and Distant Shores.
The Page 69 Test: The Electric Hotel.
--Marshal Zeringue