François Arnaud, star of Heated Rivalry, is the real-life inspiration behind Christopher Stoddard's novel At Night Only
The Californer/10339809

LOS ANGELES - Californer -- ITNA Press today confirms that Christopher Stoddard's acclaimed novel At Night Only (ITNA Press, June 2018) was directly inspired by the author's former relationship with François Arnaud, the Canadian actor known for his role in the television series Heated Rivalry.

The novel follows an unnamed narrator — a producer at an advertising firm whose gender is deliberately withheld — through two consuming and ultimately devastating relationships: one with a charismatic underground art star, the other with a handsome actor whose charm and volatility leave the narrator bereft. Set against a richly evoked contemporary New York, At Night Only has been widely praised as a searing portrait of desire, self-dissolution, and the emotional violence that can lurk beneath the surface of modern urban relationships.

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The confirmation of Arnaud's role as a source of inspiration adds a new dimension to a novel that critics have already described as unflinchingly personal. The Paris Review noted that the book "looks unrelentingly for a way out of fake love, fake relationships, and fake identities," while Slate observed that Stoddard "charts the rough path to queer self-knowledge." Legendary author Edmund White called the novel "stylish, despairing, enviable."

François Arnaud is a Montreal-born actor best known internationally for his role in Heated Rivalry. His and Stoddard's relationship, now a matter of literary record, forms the emotional spine of what Lambda Literary called "an unconventional portrait of New York, one in which creativity still thrives and where living one's life can be its own troubled art."

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At Night Only is available now in paperback and e-book formats through ITNA Press, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. ISBN: 978-0-9976432-1-3. 214 pages. $18.00.

ITNA Press is a proudly independent publisher based in Los Angeles, CA, dedicated to daring and provocative writing since 2013. Distributed via Ingram.