The Crossed Out Notebook

Nicolas Giacobone

'This stylish debut novel by an Oscar-winning Argentine screenwriter (he co-wrote Birdman) is a suspenseful darkly funny exploration of the creative process and the porous boundary between reality and fiction. Highly recommended' The Mail on Sunday 'The Best New Fiction'

From the Academy Award-winning co-writer of Birdman a wonderfully eccentric suspenseful debut in the tradition of Misery and Kiss of the Spiderwoman about a screenwriter kidnapped by a world-famous director who orders him to compose a masterpiece.

Pablo a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works day after day on what he is told must at all costs be a great world-changing screenplay. Every night after finishing work on the script Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo's diary of this time: being brought food by a maid; being threatened with a gun; vociferously arguing with the director about what he's written the previous day.

The clash between the two men and their different approaches leads to a movie being made a gun going off an unlikely escape and a final confrontation. In the end The Crossed-Out Notebook is a darkly funny novel full of intrigue and surprise about the essence of the creative process; a short crazy ode to any artist whose brilliance shines through strangeness and adversity.

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