Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds

With well-researched irony and straight-faced humor, British writer Katsoulis pulls the covers off of several notorious literary frauds, tracing the art of the Big Lie from Dionysius the Renegade, who wrote a fake Sophocles play that insulted his Stoic teachers, to more modern publishing pranks. Katsoulis writes of “the amazing lengths to which people will go to practice a deception, and the sheer nonsense gullible readers are willing to swallow,” posing a quest for fame or fortune as the motive behind such popular hoaxes as 1983's The Hitler Diaries. In the 1990s, Lex Cusack tried to raise his late father's reputation by asserting his father had advised JFK and claiming to have found shocking letters by the president among his father's paper; similarly, William Ireland in the 1790s sought his bibliophile father's approval with his faked Shakespeare documents. Katsoulis also blasts those who seek to make a profit on the suffering and death of the Holocaust in her blistering account of fake memoirs. For those intrigued by the notion of literary hoaxes, this is an entertaining guide. (Nov.)