Beautiful Somewhere Else: A Novel

By Stephen Policoff

Ever since he was an aspiring teen magician, thirty-eight-year-old Paul Brickner has been obsessed with the enigmatic Sung Soo. Known as the "Wondrous Chinese Wizard," Sung Soo was a famous con artist who taught Houdini many of his famous illusions. Paul has long since abandoned his magician aspirations but not his Sung Soo Project, which has taken many different forms over the years. Paul has been performing his own personal vanishing act for much of his adult life, trying to escape his own anxieties, responsibilities, fears, commitments, and the guilt he feels about the tragic ending of his second marriage. But things have been a little different since he met Nadia, nearly twenty years his junior and a gentle and lovely foil to Paul's profound negativity. Shortly after arriving on Cape Cod for vacation, Paul and Nadia are joined by two old friends and one troubled ex-boyfriend. When a hurricane makes landfall and knocks out the electricity, everyone drinks a little too much, and things start getting very strange, and somehow serve to bring Paul and Nadia closer together. Funny, moving, and compellingly supernatural, award-winning writer Stephen Policoff's Beautiful Somewhere Else is a mesmerizing debut novel.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786713216
• ISBN13: 9780786713219
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

vivid as a short story

The strength of this book lies in the voice of Paul, the narrator: it springs to life as immediately as if the novel were a short story, and Policoff needed every word to establish his character. The is a quiet sense of humor and misery in every line. Plotwise I thought the book needed a little more focus on both takeoff and landing, and slightly less on the confusing turbulence of the second half, forgive the metaphor. All in all a charming and vivid novel.

Obsessive summer

Although this is not your classic light beach reading, you should bring it to that summer rental house because it takes you on a different kind of trip. Not only is the novel mostly set on the Cape , but it captures the end-of-summer inner turmoil that is more real and true than the plot description would indicate. The obsessive character of the protagonist is particularly vivid and drives the sensational descriptions throughout the book. A wonderful first novel!

Dark, wry pageturner with a brain.

This isn't a quick bathroom read: sex, drugs, obsession, longing and the supernatural woven into a tight atmopsheric narrative about a man stuck in time, among other places. Policoff's character is what happens when Hawthorne meets Capote and Woody Allen drives by to wave hello. Too moody to be a throwaway summer/beach rag; sip a dark beer while you read - this book is pure autumn.

Escape Worthy

"Beautiful Somewhere Else" is a quick read, with instantly interesting characters that are both likeable and not, but nonetheless extremely entertaining. Policoff's writing is both funny and sincere, and creates a perfect narrative to a sometimes far-fetched plot. But from page one, til the end, you are completely enthralled in the world that is set up before you. The story captures you, brings you to somewhere else that is mystical, detailed, and weird. A true novel that steps outside of reality with characters that are very familiar. A quick and utterly perfect read for the warm days of summer.

Hocus Policus

Barthelme, Chagall, Pierre Franey, Zoltar, Nick Drake. It's all here. "Beautiful Somewhere Else" is readywhip magic, a lovely chatterbox of a book filled with delicious surprises.Reminds one of the last scene in Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451" where Oskar Werner (as Montag the Fireman) reads from "David Copperfield" and jump-starts his own emotional thawing-out. The memories flood in, cue Bernard Herrmann, and suddenly you're in another country.Somewhere else.