2-cb1106e2e21969f3.js","9888","static/chunks/9888-d48720c0d3cecfaf.js","1623","static/chunks/1623-8f9c42c74ef44b22.js","9678","static/chunks/9678-bc3175fdc66b489e.js","8275","static/chunks/8275-bc0cd43a5d16c2eb.js","8556","static/chunks/8556-0661fc57cf5e861e.js","1801","static/chunks/1801-ff2957ded3b42991.js","2177","static/chunks/2177-75a725a1c0a3636f.js","2450","static/chunks/2450-2af1615d1ec02554.js","3690","static/chunks/3690-d6ce99b634a3c6d6.js","6849","static/chunks/6849-a5aa65d17e203de5.js","298","static/chunks/298-222bf2d33590277a.js","7820","static/chunks/7820-25836c09109f5f87.js","686","static/chunks/686-da86c4d4102875ea.js","2755","static/chunks/app/%5Bdomain%5D/%5Blang%5D/(main)/products/%5BproductIdTitle%5D/page-0c5c4255033b3ed7.js"],"default"] 35:T768,“Woman with a Blue Pencil is a brilliantly structured labyrinth of a novel—something of an enigma wrapped in a mystery, postmodernist in its experimental bravado and yet satisfyingly well-grounded in the Los Angeles of its World War II era. Gordon McAlpine has imagined a totally unique work of ‘mystery’ fiction—one that Kafka, Borges, and Nabokov, as well as Dashiell Hammett, would have appreciated.”

—JOYCE CAROL OATES

What becomes of a character cut from a writer’s working manuscript?

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Sam Sumida, a Japanese-American academic, has been thrust into the role of amateur P.I., investigating his wife’s murder, which has been largely ignored by the LAPD. Grief stricken by her loss, disoriented by his ill-prepared change of occupation, the worst is yet to come, Sam discovers that, inexplicably, he has become not only unrecognizable to his former acquaintances but that all signs of his existence (including even the murder he’s investigating) have been erased. Unaware that he is a discarded, fictional creation, he resumes his investigation in a world now characterized not only by his own sense of isolation but by wartime fear.

Meantime, Sam