Reviews for Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds

The average rating for Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-19 00:00:00 Edward Trout When asked why he had pulled a poetry hoax that fooled the editor of the anthology Books in Canada, the poet David Solway, said, "Canadians are not very exciting people...they need to be poked." I would disagree, in one of my handful of visits to our neighbors to the North I found myself in the middle of a riot over something that us American's would probably have just grumbled loudly about, but which Canadians responded by throwing an awful lot of flaming things through the air and breaking shit. But this book isn't about this or that, I just thought I'd share that one quote from the book. This book I thought would be interesting, and it was. Sort of. It was also yet another disappointment in this sort of genre of book, the hundred-thousand word (or so) compendium of facts sort of book that is just a bunch of short entries and not as nearly interesting as I imagined the book would be when I first saw it. What I did learn in this book was that there have been many more hoaxes in recent years than I was aware of. Some of them I have a feeling were caught before a books publication or else so close to the release that they never ended up shipping to stores. Why? Because so many of these fake memoirs (especially about the Holocaust) would have been books in my sections and I would have been told to go pull them from the shelf when the publisher recalled them, but I don't remember doing this very often. Plagiarism I can remember, but hoaxes? Not so much. Hoaxes occupy a hazy area. A hoax can be a joke. It can be used to throw mud on the faces of pompous windbags, like say in the Skoal hoax, it can be someone making up facts about their own life and passing it off as truth. It can be exposed and result in humiliation like in the case of James Frey, or it can be ignored and the books can still go on to be treated as 'fictional-fact' like in say Mutant Messages Down Under. The hoax can be about authorial voice and when the curtained is pulled back the industry churning around the author collapses (like JT LeRoy). The hoax can be some young man forging letters by Shakespeare and selling them a Bard-gone-wild 18th century England. When you start to look at all these examples you start to think, what exactly is a hoax? There is obviously the common thread of the person creating the work not turning out to be really the person the people buying a work expect it to be. But what about the writer of sensitive and insightful fiction who in reality is some brutal asshole, the fierce leftist political writer who is a money-grubbing bore in real life? Hoaxes? No, of course not, but aren't they projecting an image that is counter to what their real-self is? What this book did teach me is that the world of literary hoaxes is really a kind of murky world. Some of the people in here are obviously just literary con-men (and women), but what about an author of fiction who in order to get published creates a persona. Yeah it's for money, and yeah people might be believing that an author is an uber-hipster twenty-something year old former truck-stop prostitute; but is in reality a forty year old woman. But are the fictional words she wrote any less valid than the ones supposedly written by Jerome Terminator LeRoy? But it's not truth!!!!! Is it meant to be? But this book. These bite size vignettes are interesting but the majority of them just aren't that satisfying, they are too short, too brief, and sometimes just too laughably incorrect with their conjectures about what the future will hold for a hoaxers future. Not that I'm holding the authors uncanny ability of not-predicting the future against her. It's more just the genre that this book falls into. The expectations I build reading the dust-jacket of books like this matched with the reality of the books. The failure of the work to live up to expectations. The reality and truth conflicting with my belief and expectations. Hoax? What did I really learn from this book? That Australia is a hotbed for literary hoaxes, and not all of them evil hoaxes. One of them was actually quite touching. One last question. Is a forgery technically a hoax? I feel like this book should have focused on just one or two types of hoaxes instead of being as almost a hodgepodge mess as this review.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-25 00:00:00 Jeffrey Paskar Granted, not exactly well written. The thing is, I loved the material so much, I overlooked the subpar quality of writing... Almost. How to explain, now, how the writing was subpar, exactly? Well... It felt like an average freshman university paper. Maybe even an excelling high school senior, using a thesaurus. Cliches were used, transitions were not exactly smooth, the research was there, but in the end seemed executed poorly. I can almost imagine the author impressed with herself as she puts the finishing touches on her "ingenious" categorization of chapters (). Also located more than one grammatical error, so not sure where the Editors were.... She also used practically the same words for differing descriptions. In other words, university student using thesaurus? Mark Twain to Victorian Age poets; Holocaust survivors whom made up more (why would anyone fictionalize your life when your true life story is already better) to those pretending to having been; Australian (according to the author the country where this is most prevalent?); The New Yorker's Jonah Lehrer to personal favorite James Frey, whom blindsided, humiliated, magicianed Oprah before the entire nation.... But then was given the same in return + some. Why my personal favorite? It is not because of the attention, but because I truly love his writing & cannot understand how he could have kinda-sorta-maybe-we-will-see done this to his career by unnecessarily fabricating minor details. (Yes, Vonia is so upset you are seeing pleonasm here... ) Anyways, I was intrigued by the information, so I am thankful for her research. It was more of a fun beach read, I would say, then what this is being marketed as. What else did I learn? These occur far more often than I realized. Are still occurring ever more often than that, with those that have been undiscovered. That, am I to conscientiously dedicate resources to completing my own memoir, I need to be aware that plagiarism is not what I originally believed it to defined as. Apparently, I can plagiarize myself. Which I am having trouble understanding still. A little. Oh, we also reconfirmed that Oprah can, would, likely already does rule the world.