Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold

He has also published fiction, essays, memoir and reviews in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, Wired and Zyzzyva. Gold's short stories have appeared in a number of issues of McSweeney's. It’s likely the best memoir published in years.' About it, Darin Strauss ( Half a Life, Chang and Eng) writes, '“ I Will Be Complete is the best memoir I’ve read in years. His most recent book is a memoir, I Will Be Complete (Knopf, 2018).

His next novel, Sunnyside (Knopf, 2009), is a dark romp concerning Charlie Chaplin's rise to fame during World War I and its parallels with America's embrace of its part on the world stage. It has been translated into 14 languages. Glen David Gold is the author of Carter Beats the Devil (Hyperion, 2001), a historical novel about Charles Carter, a real-life San Francisco stage magician who performs for President Warren Harding on the evening of Harding's mysterious death. By turns suspenseful, moving, and magical, this is the historical novel to give to anyone who complains that contemporary fiction has lost the ability to both move and entertain. Yet none of this is as broadly drawn as it might sound: Gold's characters are driven by childhood sorrows and disappointments in love, just like the rest of us, and they're limned in clever, quicksilver prose. Carter Beats the Devil has a mustachioed villain, chase scenes, a lion, miraculous escapes, even pirates, for God's sake. Gold has written for movies and TV, so it's no surprise that he delivers snappy, fast-paced dialogue and action scenes as expertly scripted as anything that's come out of Hollywood in years.

Farnsworth and self-made millionaire Francis 'Borax' Smith, and you have old-fashioned entertainment executed with a decidedly modern sensibility. Throw in countless stunning (and historically accurate) illusions, some beautifully rendered period detail, and historical figures like young inventor Philo T. In the course of subsequent pages, Carter finds himself pursued by the most hapless of FBI agents falls in love with a beautiful, outspoken blind woman and confronts an old nemesis bent on destroying him. Or does he? It's only the first of many misdirections in a magical performance by Gold. Shortly afterwards, Harding dies mysteriously in his San Francisco hotel room, and Carter is forced to flee the country. Gold's debut novel opens with real-life magician Charles Carter executing a particularly grisly trick, using President Warren G.

In Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold subjects the past to the same wondrous transformations as the rabbit in a skilled illusionist's hat.

Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold