About the Author [Paperback]

John Colapinto's About the Author is a wicked thriller set in the ferocious world of publishing and a burning satire on what it takes to make a bestseller. Narrator, wannabe writer and stockboy Cal Cunningham has written nothing since he arrived in New York but he has relentlessly regaled his reclusive flatmate with his sexual conquests. When he discovers his roommate's finished manuscript,

a virtual transcription of the monologues with which [he] had entertained Stewart during the two and a half years of [their] roommatehood. It was all there. All of it. Not just the "Dispatches from Downtown" with their ribald tales of romantic conquest and alcohol abuse, but the truly precious stuff, the irreplaceable personal lode of [his] childhood memories, with all their pain and yearning and loss,

he justifies his subsequent plagiarism. By the end of Colapinto's novel, we are left with a dead flatmate, a half-murdered blackmailer, a deceased phoney cop, a drug deal on the Canadian border and a lot of close calls--all for the sake of Art.

About the Author starts off promisingly with its mellifluous, loquacious first-person narrative and its challenging moral premise, making this a real page-turner. Unfortunately, it loses steam halfway through as our narrator/anti-hero moves from the potentially explosive possibilities of New York City to the safe little hamlet of New Halcyon and the perfect life with the even more perfect wife. What could have been an inflammatory satire on the fiery world of publishing (Cal's agent Blackie Yaeger is a wonderfully drawn caricature but, disappointingly, never developed to his full Faustian potential) abruptly loses its sizzle. Nonetheless, it's worth reading Colapinto's assured first foray into Fiction, as he's sure to be a talent you'll hear from again, especially with the film rights to his novel already sold. An interesting case of life imitating art perhaps!

Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone Journalist Colapinto's first book was the bestselling non-fiction title As Nature Made Him. --Nicola Perry --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

‘A Perfect novel…not only a devastatingly witty satire on American literary life but also a thriller of which Patricia Highsmith would have been proud.’ The Sunday Times

‘Blackly comic thriller and a sly, spot-on satire of Bookbiz hoopla.’ The Times

‘A thriller worthy of Hitchcock at his best. I wasn’t able to put it down. Splendid suspense.’ Stephen King

‘Gleaming, well written and exciting.’ Financial Times

‘It is enormously, compulsively readable…the book is difficult to stop reading.’ Spectator

‘Masterly’ Daily Mail

‘It will satisfy readers who want to know what’s new in literary fiction as well as those seeking the comforts of a well-told reader.’ Guardian

'A thriller worthy of Hitchcock at his best. I wasn't able to put it down. Splendid suspense.'

'This is a deftly plotted novel, with all the neccessary twists...'

A sly satire combined with a gripping suspense...funny, wicked and deeply entertaining.'

'Enormously, compulsively readable.'

A wickedly funny psychological thriller about literary ambition, envy and the lengths an author will go to get on the bestsellers list.

Cal Cunningham dreams of writing an autobiographical novel that will help him escape from his life as a penniless bookstore stockboy in upper Manhattan. Yet, after two years of living together, it is Stewart, Cal’s studious flatmate who has finished writing a page-turning novel – based on Cal’s life.

When a timely, fatal bicycle accident removes Stewart from the scene, Cal appropriates the manuscript as his own and places it in the hands of the legendarily ferocious literary agent Blackie Yeager.

Soon Cal realises his most outlandish fantasies of literary success. That is, until he discovers that someone knows his secret. For Cal, this means plotting not just his second novel, but also his first murder.

Cal Cunningham, a penniless Manhattan bookstore clerk, has always dreamed of writing a book that would rocket him to the top of the bestsellers list. 'Almost Like Suicide', the great novel, based on Cal's life, fulfils his every fantasy making Cal the hottest thing in New York. But is Cal the author? And what happened to his flatmate Stewart, who died in a bicycle accident, and had literary aspirations of his own?

In John Colapinto's highly acclaimed, wickedly satiric thriller, plagiarism, deception and blackmail culminate in Cal plotting not just his second book, but also his first killing.

'"A perfect novel…A thriller of which Patricia Highsmith would have been proud."'
'Sunday Times'

'"A 'noir' thriller – gleaming, well written and exciting."'
'Financial Times'

'"Don't miss this clever, intense story."'
'Marie Claire'

'"Brilliant debut novel."'
'Time Out'

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

John Colapinto’s articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Mademoiselle, US, and Rolling Stone. His first book, ‘As Nature Made Him’, was based on an article published in Rolling Stone that won the National Magazine Award, was a New York Times bestseller, and garenered a Books for a Better Life Award for John. He lives in New York City with his wife and son. This is his first novel.

For reasons that will become obvious, I find it difficult to write about Stewart. Well, I find it difficult to write about anything, God knows. But Stewart presents special problems. Do I speak of him as I later came to know him, or as he appeared to me before I learned the truth, before I stripped away the mask of normalcy he hid behind? For so long he seemed nothing but a footnote to my life, a passing reference in what I had imagined would be the story of my swift rise to literary stardom. Today he not only haunts every line of this statement but is, in a sense, its animating spirit, its reason for being.

We were roommates. I moved into Stewart Church’s New York apartment in the fall after my graduation from the University of Minnesota. In his Roommate Wanted ad in the Village Voice, he had described himself as a "First-year law student at Columbia University," and he looked every inch of it: tall and thin, with a doleful,high-cheek-boned face, carroty hair cropped close against the sides of his narrow skull, and greenish eyes that seemed rubbed to dullness from the hours spent scouring the microscopic print of his casebooks. Not that any of this was exactly a bad thing. It was just that Stewart did not fit my initial idea of the kind of person I would end up living with in Manhattan. I was an aspiring author and thus viewed my every action and utterance with an eye to how they would appear when fixed in imperishable print. As such, I considered myself to inhabit a higher plane of existence than people like Stewart. He so clearly belonged to the trudging armies of nonartists!
, of mere human beings: the workaday drones who live out their unobjectionable lives, then pass, unremembered by all but their immediate families, into oblivion. But then, in a way, Stewart seemed to be exactly what I needed in a roommate: a cipher unlikely to distract me from what I thought would be my almost monastic absorption in the pursuit of literature.

Our apartment, a dark one-bedroomed on the first floor of a pre-war walk-up on West 173rd Street in Washington Heights, was obviously meant for a single occupant, or a childless couple. Both of us were broke at the time – Stewart was subsisting on a small scholarship, I toiling for a minimum wage as a stockboy at Stodart’s Books in midtown. And so, with the resourcefulness common to twenty-three-year-olds in our era of diminished expectations, we devised a way to ensure a measure of privacy. I slept on a sofabed in the apartment’s front room, an oblong chamber with a dirt-ingrained hardwood floor and chipped wall moldings; Stewart occupied the adjacent bedroom, a space almost identical to mine, with the same view out its windows of the back alley and the fire escapes of the neighbouring tenement. The rest of the apartment – a kitchen with small café table, a bathroom crammed with a claw-foot tub and a trickling toilet – was communal.

There are only two conditions under which a pair of straight men can share such quarters: as buddies willing to overlook each other’s peccadilloes, or as respectful strangers willing to stay out of each other’s way. Stewart and I were the latter. Digging his way out from under what seemed like an endless avalanche of essays and briefs, Stewart spent most of his time either shuttered in his room or squirreled away in the stacks of the law library. I, meanwhile, devoted myself to gathering the "material" that I hoped would one day comprise my autobiographical novel.

A word here about the womanizing that became my chief occupation during the two and a half years that I lived with Stewart. I was not, in the accepted sense of the term, a sexual predator. For one thing, I was too poor for that. Unlike the double-breasted smoothies who used their gold cards and Rolexes to lure their quarry into cabs, I had nothing but my charm and what I can describe only as my sincerity to offer. My looks helped: an inch over six feet tall, panther-thin, with a strongly boned face softened by a tangled mass of black Byronic locks, I had the kind of appearance that attracted all manner of females, from the lacquered gold diggers who bustled through the aisles of Stodart’s Books to the porcelain-skinned, Amazon-limbed fashion models who slummed in East Village bars. Such women, who are the target of the true pickup artist, were never my first choice. No, it was the funky and bohemian artist girls who made my heart pound, the Cooper Union students with gesso-splattered shoes and Conte-rimmed fingernails who set me dreaming of a soul connection in lonesome New York. That these fierce, independent, talented girls would – after an evening’s talk about books, movies, paintings, music – actually go to bed with me seemed, at first, too good to be true. Sure enough it was. Although they would sleep with me once or twice, such women, I soon learned, had plans and dreams of their own, which emphatically did not include tying themselves down to one man. Again and again my efforts to convert one of these one-night stands into something long-term was met with rebuff. I continued to trawl the bars, but I could no longer kid myself that I was on a quest for permanent love.

I had worried, at first, that Stewart might take exception to the way I was conducting my romantic life. In this, he surprised me. He soon revealed a fascination with my adventures in New York night-town. He first asked me about them one Sunday morning early in our roommatehood, after he had returned, flushed and sweating, from his weekly bike ride. Initially hesitant to offer up details, in case I might offend what I took to be Stewart’s virginal nature, I simply muttered a few oblique evasions.