From the author of the New York Times bestseller As Nature Made Him comes a “clever and entertaining first novel.”—Elle

Despite a severe case of writer's block, Cal Cunningham dreams of writing a novel that will permit him to escape from his life as a penniless stockboy in dirty and dangerous upper Manhattan bookstore. However, when his roommate is suddenly killed in a bicycle accident, Cal is suddenly the author of a page-turning autobiography. Propelled to the top of the bestseller lists with million-dollar movie deals, Cal finds that he has realized his most outlandish fantasies of literary success. That is, until he discovers that someone knows his secret.

A searingly funny psychological thriller, About the Author delves into the excesses of the publishing world and shows that sometimes the difference between reality and imagination can be fatal.

Toronto native JOHN COLAPINTO, who started his career at Saturday Night magazine in Toronto, is an award-winning journalist and an author and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has written, for The New Yorker, about subjects as diverse as medicinal leeches, Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer, fashion designers Karl Lagerfeld and Rick Owens, and Paul McCartney.

His piece on the linguistic oddities of the Piraha (an Amazonian tribe) was anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, his New Yorker story about loss prevention (anti-theft in stores) was included in The Best American Crime Reporting, a New Yorker profile of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran was selected by Freeman Dyson for inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and his story "Mother Courage" on Duchenne muscular dystrophy was included in The Best American Science Writing.

Prior to The New Yorker, John Colapinto wrote for Vanity Fair, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine and was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He published a 20,000-word feature in Rolling Stone titled "The True Story of John/Joan," an account of David Reimer, who underwent a sex change in infancy—a medical experiment long heralded as a success, but which was, in fact, a failure. The story, which detailed not only Reimer's tortured life but the medical scandal surrounding its cover-up, won the ASME Award for reporting and led to As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, a New York Times bestseller. Film rights were bought by Peter Jackson (director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy).

John Colapinto's first novel, About the Author, a tale of literary envy and theft, was published in 2001. The number-six pick on the Booksense 76 Best Novels of the season, it was a nominee for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was praised as “a thriller worthy of Hitchcock at his best” by Stephen King. A sceenplay for the film was developed by award-winning British playwright Patrick Marber for Dreamworks, and the film rights have since been acquired by Modern Family director Jason Winer.

John Colapinto's profile page