The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith
About Dominic Smith
Dominic grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of four novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times Bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Sold into more than a dozen countries, the novel was chosen as a best book of 2016 by Amazon, Slate, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Kirkus Reviews. In Australia, the novel won the Fiction Indie Book of the Year Award from the Independent Booksellers Association and was named the Literary Fiction Book of the Year as part of the Australian Book Industry Awards. His other novels include: The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, and Bright and Distant Shores. Dominic serves on the fiction faculty in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Southern Methodist University, and Rice University.
About The Electric Hotel
Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey–America’s first movie town–and on the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man’s doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder. For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumiere brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel–the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose–the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.
