Literary Hoaxes

[rahw]

(HuntingtonNews.net) - As the recent Colorado "Balloon Boy" staged-for-
media event demonstrates, there must be a hoax gene lurking in many
people, awaiting only the proper time to be unleashed.

Melissa Katsoulis provides a very good sampling of hoaxes by writers
in her "Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous
Frauds" (Amazon.com: http://xrl.us/LiteraryHoaxes ).

James Frey scammed a major publisher, Random House, and Oprah Winfrey
in his faux addiction memoir "A Million Little Pieces" published in
2003 and exposed as a fake in late 2005 and early 2006; and a white
"Valley Girl" using the nom de plume Margaret B. Jones (real name
Margaret Seltzer) pretended to be a half Native-American, half-white
gang follower in her faux memoir "Love and Consequences." Riverhead,
an imprint of Penguin, published her story of growing up the foster
child of black parents in South-Central Los Angeles, and Oprah
featured "Jones" on her show. One wonders about the fact-checking,
vetting process of Oprah's show, as well as fact-checking at major
publishers. Katsoulis says the vetting procedures have been tightened
in the wake of the Frey and "Jones" episodes, both of which are
examined in detail in this book. I wonder if they have been, since new
fakes keep cropping up..

Continued: http://xrl.us/LiteraryHoaxesReview