Glen David Gold

Glen David Gold's newest work, Sunnyside, was published in 2009 and gives us a brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center. Described as “darkly comic” and “heartrending” the novel captures Chaplin’s enduring personality at a moment when American capitalism and war dominate the social and political landscape. Ron Charles of the Washington Post writes, “Most important, Gold has figured out how to make Chaplin strut and feint and dance in print. His depiction of him as a director -- ordering up sets and costumes and actors one minute, canceling them the next -- rings with all the music of the genius at work. In scenes of rich psychological acuity, Gold captures Chaplin's crippling depression, his sense of being constrained by his audience, his financiers and his own impossible standards, despite living at the center of "a tulipomania of appreciation." He is, as Gold says, "the physic of laughter who could never heal himself." Sunnyside was also featured in the  New York Times Sunday Book Review  in August 2009.
Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil (Hyperion, 2001) was well received and also featured in The New York Times Review of Books. Carter Beats the Devil is a fictionalised biography of Charles Joseph Carter (1874-1936), an American illusionist performing from c.1900-1936.  Gold is married to Alice Sebold, the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky. The couple live in San Francisco, California.