Smith, Dominic

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Smith, Dominic

PERSONAL:

Born in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; immigrated to the United States. Education: University of Iowa, B.A.; University of Texas, Austin, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Austin, TX. Agent—Wendy Weil, The Wendy Weil Agency, 232 Madison Ave., Ste. 1300, New York, NY 10016. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

James A. Michener fellowship in fiction, 2000; Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, 2002, for "The Hazelbrook Herald"; Dobie Paisano fellowship, Texas Institute of Letters, 2003; Pushcart Prize nomination and Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, both 2004, for "The Projectionist." The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre was chosen for Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program, 2006.

WRITINGS:

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (novel), Atria Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of short stories. Contributor to literary journals and periodicals, including the Antioch Review, Gulf Coast Review, Mid-American Review, and Atlantic Monthly.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dominic Smith's debut novel, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, is a fictionalized account of the later life of Daguerre, whose contribution to the process of photography involved adding mercury vapor to a photo produced on a silver iodide-finished copper plate. The process, daguerreotype, was named after him. The story begins in 1846, when Daguerre is nearly sixty. His mind is addled from mercury poisoning, and he foresees the end of the world. Before this comes to pass, he is determined to take ten photographs that include a beautiful naked woman, the sun, the moon, a perfect Paris boulevard, a pastoral scene, a galloping horse, an apple, a flower, the king, and his first love, Isobel Le Fournier, the family nursemaid he adored from the age of twelve. He walks the streets of Montmartre with the poet Charles Baudelaire, searching for his subjects, further feeding his hallucinations with mind-altering substances such as hashish and absinthe.

At a party thrown by Baudelaire, he meets a kind-hearted prostitute named Chloe, who happens to be Isobel's daughter. Library Journal contributor Prudence Peiffer found this scene "particularly memorable." During the French Revolution of 1848, Daguerre is shot, and Chloe brings him to her mother, who cares for him. The elderly couple reconcile their differences and enjoy happiness for a brief time. A Kirkus Reviews critic described The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre as "a compelling psychological study, a thoughtful tracing of the birth of a new art form and an atmospheric portrait of nineteenth-century France: impressive on all three counts."