The Counterfeiter

At the end of his sophomore year at Columbia, young go-getter Ari Edelman returns to his modest family home on Long Island and takes a job as a handyman at Ocean House, the iconic Hamptons estate of wealthy author Edward Vann. As the summer advances, so does Ari's position in Edward's life, and he even helps to shape Edward's current novel. But the ambitious Ari has always wanted more than what life tends to offer, and by the time he reaches middle age, Ari has constructed a fantasy of that 1950s summer starring an alter ego named Ned Deane, who served as Edward's close friend, cowriter, and eventual lover.

Inspired by André Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), Ed Cone has constructed a sweeping literary drama of one man's dissatisfaction with the tedium of normal life. Through closely paralleled storylines, The Counterfeiter cleverly unfolds to reveal the fluid nature of identity, sexuality, and love.

After earning a B.A. degree at Washington University in St Louis and graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Ed Cone spent a year studying political science on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Université de Lyon, France, then won a Fellowship to Columbia University's School of International Affairs. He pursued a career in publishing while writing novels and short stories on the side.
He has worked as an editor for such publishers as Random House, Macmillan, St. Martin's, Dutton, and William Morrow, and as a book review editor for Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. He also reviews books in such areas as literary fiction, politics, and international relations. As a Tour Guide licensed by New York City's Department of Consumer Affairs, he has given tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn for a private clientele, some of which he's conducted in French and in German. He is also an enthusiastic linguist with varying degrees of fluency in French, German, Italian, Russian, and modern Greek. He has studied tap dancing and is probably the only tap-dancing former managing editor in New York City.

Originally from the South, Cone has lived with his family in Manhattan for decades. The Counterfeiter is his first published novel.