The Pornographer's Apprentice

When a videotape shows up with a note talking blackmail, ADA Dale Cuffy knows it's a matter requiring an unofficial response - especially as the video catches him at an orgy with more than his pants down. Even worse is the fatal accident (in dying color) involving his wife, who appears to have caused the crash on purpose, in disguise. How are these scenes related? Who played witness, on-the-spot with a camera? Can Dale thwart the blackmailer and be sure of keeping secrets? Shauna knows what Dale does not: the identity of the pornographer and the name of his opportunistic apprentice. College classmate, spurned admirer, disappointed in life and love, Milo Duarte abandons Shakespearean scholarship to prove a point Shakespeare knew: Sex sells. It always has. Jobless and short on options, Milo brings to market Jason's old videotapes, created more than a decade ago. The profits that follow transform his threadbare existence into relative affluence, which he hides as carefully as Jason's tapes. When mail-order erotica becomes blackmail, however, Milo learns that violations of human decency court an awful vengeance. Can video recordings ease existential dread? What if the woman you most desire and cannot have is featured? Will electromagnetic playback (in analog ) allow her to remain young and beautiful forever? Is watching acceptable if she doesn't know? What if she does? And if she was not fully consenting during some or all of these acts, are their audiovisual renderings harmless entertainments or evidence of multiple felonious assaults -- that is, rapes? In case of the latter, which is the worse crime: offering the videos for sale or erasing the evidence? A narrative of operatic variety, "The Pornographer's Apprentice" dramatizes an extreme and illicit gambit of a young man determined to satisfy his desire for one special woman -- and how his friend's counter-plot costs him his life. It is a story of sex and death, art and money, poetry and pornography, life's brevity and our yearning for permanence. "The Pornographer's Apprentice" is by the author of "Hunting Old Sammie" and "2094."

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Notă biografică

John Lauricella was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where he attended the public schools. He studied fiction-writing with Frederick Busch at Colgate University, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated magna cum laude. Later, he earned an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in English at Cornell University. He is the author of "Home Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction" (McFarland & Company, 1999), and has published fiction in "Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture," and in "Stone Canoe: A Journal of Arts, Literature, and Social Commentary." He has taught fiction-writing, expository writing, and personal-essay writing (as well as courses in the American novel, British modernism, and the poetry and prose of Renaissance England) at several colleges and universities. His other low-wage jobs include stints as a library archivist, golf caddie, commercial freelance writer, proofreader, and copy-editor. He is the author of "Hunting Old Sammie," published by Irving Place Editions in April 2013, and of "2094," published by the same imprint in 2014. He and his wife and their children have lived in Ithaca, New York, since 2001.