The Unexpected Salami: A Novel

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Apr 1999 · Sold by Algonquin Books

About this eBook

The Tall Poppies--a few days ago, they were just another Aussie band watching their fame ebb faster than a nitrous high. Then Stuart, the drummer, is gunned down by Australian drug lords, and the band is suddenly news in Australia, America, and even on CNN. Rachel, a chatty twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker, is the band's housemate. She digs Colin, the bassist, who has commitment issues. After witnessing the murder, she flees to the safety of family in NYC, where she bumps into Stuart, the "corpse," ordering tuna salad on rye at Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop. This is a story about sex, rock 'n' roll, the pressures of hipness, making it big, and reconciling family ties. And Colin and Rachel's own unlikely story of true love is the best unexpected salami of them all. "Full of fresh characters and crazy coincidences."--Library Journal; "An engagingly breezy first novel . . . has commendable energy and marches along smartly to its own arrhythmic, offbeat beat."--Kirkus Reviews; "The language is as crisp and dead-on as the movie Clueless, and the action as picaresque as Moll Flanders."--Frank McCourt, author of ANGELA'S ASHES.

About the author

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a native Manhattanite. Her resume includes time as a sex call screener for Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and as Peter Jennings's assistant at a publishing company. She now works full-time writing fiction and screenplays and coproducing independent films, including The McCourts of Limerick and Once When I Was a Cannibal. She's currently writing the screenplay for The Unexpected Salami which has been optioned for a film by Radical Media.