Woman with a Blue Pencil: A Novel

Woman with a Blue Pencil: A Novel

â€œWoman with a Blue PencilÂ is a brilliantly structured labyrinth of a novelâ€”something of an enigma wrapped in a mystery, postmodernist in its experimental bravado and yet satisfyingly well-grounded in the Los Angeles of its World War II era. Gordon McAlpine has imagined a totally unique work of â€˜mysteryâ€™ fictionâ€”one that Kafka, Borges, and Nabokov, as well as Dashiell Hammett, would have appreciated.â€
Â
â€”JOYCE CAROL OATES

What becomes of a character cut from a writerâ€™s working manuscript?Â
Â
On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Sam Sumida, a Japanese-American academic, has been thrust into the role of amateur P.I., investigating his wifeâ€™s murder, which has been largely ignored by the LAPD.Â Grief stricken by her loss, disoriented by his ill-prepared change of occupation, the worst is yet to come, Sam discovers that, inexplicably, he has become not only unrecognizable to his former acquaintances but that all signs of his existence (including even the murder heâ€™s investigating) have been erased. Unaware that he is a discarded, fictional creation, he resumes his investigation in a world now characterized not only by his own sense of isolation but by wartime fear.Â

Meantime, Samâ€™s story is interspersed with chapters from a pulp spy novel that features an L.A.-based Korean P.I. with jingoistic and anti-Japanese, post December 7th attitudes â€“ the revised, politically and commercially viable character for whom Sumida has been excised.Â

Behind it all is the ambitious, 20-year-old Nisei author who has made the changes, despite the relocation of himself and his family to a Japanese internment camp.Â And, looming above, is his book editor in New York, who serves as both muse and manipulator to the young authorâ€”the woman with the blue pencil, a new kind of femme fatale.Â Â Â

Country	USA
Author	Gordon McAlpine
Binding	Paperback
EAN	9781633880887
ISBN	1633880885
Label	Seventh Street Books
Manufacturer	Seventh Street Books
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	185
PublicationDate	2015-11-10
Publisher	Seventh Street Books
ReleaseDate	2015-11-10
Studio	Seventh Street Books

Woman with a Blue Pencil: A Novel

You might also like...