About the Author

John Lauricella is the author of five novels and many short stories. Born in Brooklyn a thousand years ago, he was taken away as a child to suburban New Jersey and eventually escaped that captivity to spend four undergraduate years at Colgate University, which he reimagines in his novel THE PORNOGRAPHER’S APPRENTICE as the College on the Hill. A good student, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. A so-called gap year featured rustication at a semi-famous, private golf club, where he served as a caddy. Admission to Cornell University and the generous strength of a Sage Graduate Fellowship enabled him to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. Later, he earned a Ph.D. in English Language & Literature at Cornell. The monograph that was his dissertation became his first book, HOME GAMES: ESSAYS ON BASEBALL FICTION (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Publishers, 1999). That volume, esoteric, meticulous, and scholarly, was well-received by the few who read it. Chapters on, respectively, THE GREAT GATSBY, THE SOUND AND THE FURY, and THE NATURAL have been reprinted variously in Contemporary American Authors (Gale Research) and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (Gale/Cengage Learning); both publications are library references for higher education. His short fictions have appeared in Arts & Letters, Stone Canoe, and The Piltdown Review. His novels, HUNTING OLD SAMMIE (2013); 2094 (2014), and THE PORNOGRAPHER'S APPRENTICE (2015) are available as print-on-demand paperbacks, and in some cases as ebooks. Lacking resources to advertise and promote these titles, he has relied on the kindness of strangers to develop a readership. We seek more fruitful strategies for his new manuscripts: “Unforgettable,” a semi-autobiographical novel with an unspeakable evil haunting is dark heart; and “The China Plot,” a true-life fiction about an American novelist who is caught up in a U.S.-Sino propaganda gambit and becomes a person of interest to a beautiful Chinese spy. Lauricella lives still in Ithaca, NY, because his beloved wife is a pedagogic legend at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell. If the New York State Lottery ever cooperates with his random picks, he aims to make good on his promise to take himself to the Hawaiian Islands, where he will remain for the duration pondering the implications of his zodiac sign being, in the Greek tradition, Taurus and, in the Chinese tradition, Ox.