About the Author

John Colapinto

You see yourself as an author – but so far are an author wannabe. You move to New York City, get a cheap room in Washington Heights with a law student, and tell stories to your roomie on weekends. But in front of a sheet of paper, you draw blanks – staring, adjusting paper, cracking knuckles, adjusting the chair, re-adjust paper. And as you are doing this, the roommate brings you a short story to read, which you feel is flawless, perfect, humbling. And worst of all, you feel betrayed – since you thought you were rooming with a lawyer-to-be.

This is the position that Cal Cunningham, the narrator, finds himself in when Stewart springs the short story on him. And it gets worse. Stewart confides that he has written a novel and does not want Cal to see it until the one person he trusts first reads it. The following day is Cal's day off, and immediately after Stewart leaves the apartment with his bike for class Cal locates the key for the file cabinet and begins to read the novel. After a few minutes the police call to advise Cal, the “emergency contact” that there has been an accident and he must some to the morgue to identify Stewart's body.

Without giving too much away, Cal justifies, with some flawed logic, assuming authorship of Stewart's novel – which, in the skilled hands of a literary agent, gets both a book and movie advance totaling $1.7 million, along with it instant fame. And near instant problems to go with the fame. A rags to riches story.

But how does it happen that no one knows that Stewart is the author? Therein lies the riches to rags part. But the telling of the story as memoir allows the phoenix to rise again. The Baltimore Sun called this “…the literary equivalent of Escher's hands drawing each other”.