Description
Things have not been going well for Dez. He’s broke, jobless, angry and without a future. Then he happens to see an episode of “Tovah in the Afternoon” featuring the fabulously successful memoirist Jasper Ulrickson…
A masterful satire, this novel hinges on celebrity envy—and the anarchic imperatives of desire. Dez, determined to bring Jasper down to his own level, devises a diabolical scheme to ruin Jasper’s reputation and seize his fortune. He uses a novel weapon: forbidden Eros. What ensues is a descent into psychological nightmare, one lit with dark flashes of humor and illuminating tragedy. Like watching Othello fall to Iago’s masterful manipulations, we are riveted by Dez’s cruel trick, this coldly calculated attempt to destroy another human being—this spectacle of an upright man brought low by envy and the implacable demands of desire.
A risk-taking and courageous novel unsparing in its dissection of the erotic impulse, An Upright Man speaks to our era’s corrosive fascination with the cult of celebrity, money and the compulsion to get ahead at all costs.
About the author
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.
