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 instigated the crash, 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 holds the key: the identity of the pornographer and the name of his apprentice.

A narrative of operatic variety, The Pornographer’s Apprentice dramatizes a young man’s extreme and illicit gambit to satisfy his desire for one special woman - and how his friend’s counterplot defeats his intentions. It is a story of sex and death, art and money, poetry and pornography, life’s brevity and our yearning for permanence.

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.