Laura Kalpakian | Award Winning Author

The Great Pretenders

Hollywood in the Fifties: the stars who glittered in the heavens, and the directors, producers and studio chiefs who made their lives hell. From the beach at Malibu to leafy Laurel Canyon, from the soundstages of Empire Pictures to wailing saxes in jazz clubs on Central Avenue, Roxanne Granville’s sunlit world is shadowed by secrets. She must navigate dangerous depths and shoals that will test her integrity and her capacity for love.

Learn More

“She’s so entertaining a writer that it takes a while to realize how smart she is.”

~The New Yorker

“Her characters change and grow, and the story, instead of being reduced to a central issue, develops out of one.”

~Times Literary Supplement (London)

“Kalpakian can make 70 lines just as enduring as their equal in pages. And her writing is clearly inspired by a fire in the belly.”

~Bloomsbury Review

“Here we have a novel of great strength and scope with the impact and exhaustive character studies of the work of Henry James or Saul Bellow.”

~West Coast Review of Books

“Wry and ripping one moment and tender and lyrical the next, Kalpakian works several plots at once and neatly and obliquely weaves them into the narrative to the degree that the past is always impinging on the present.”

~Boston Globe

Also By Laura

More books

About Laura

Laura Kalpakian was nominated for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for American Cookery. She won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award (twice), the Anahid Award for an American writer of Armenian descent, the PEN West Award, and the Stand International Short Fiction Competition. She has had residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Montalvo Center for the Arts, and Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. She is the author of sixteen novels, and four collections, and over a hundred stories published in collections, anthologies, literary journals and magazines in the USA and the UK.

Learn More

Latest Posts

The Club

The Club, above all, expands on the famous Samuel Johnson quip: “He who is tired of London, is tired of life!” The thump and bustle of 18th century London throbs in these pages.

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell By David Yaffe

This heartbreaking saga was the life of the woman who made brilliant the bittersweet “Chelsea Morning” when “The sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses….” Is there no justice?

West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan

Each time I return to FSF’s novels, his stories, his letters and essays I am saddened, even touched by the talents he squandered. If only….. hangs over the last dozen years of his short life. In some ways I marvel at what he did accomplish, given the self-destruction everywhere apparent.

Blog