Laura Kalpakian

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.

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“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

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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.

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Latest Posts

Women in Hollywood

Offscreen roles for women have changed over the years. In 1948 women made up some 25% of the writers in Hollywood. By 1974 that number had fallen to 14%.

The Blacklist Era

Despite a longstanding love of film and the darkened theatre, I had never given much thought to the Hollywood blacklist until the 1999 Oscars when the Academy gave a special award to Elia Kazan, the legendary director – and cooperating witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Television

Television is an important part of my novel, The Great Pretenders. Doing the research, I was astonished to find that the first talkie of Cyrano de Bergerac was actually made for British television in 1938.