Telling Tales by Melissa Katsoulis
Stories of famous literary hoaxes and the perpetrators thereof, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Mark Twin’s overtly fictional newspaper columns to James Frey and JT Leroy.
If you like stories, you’ll like this. Pithy but interesting chronicles of fakers and how and why they did what they did. The most interesting thing was how forgiving the author was of these hoaxers. Many of them were clearly raised wrong and had deep-seated psychological reasons for doing what they did, but Katsoulis goes out of her way to find reasons that most of them might have just needed a hug. Which is sweet, really, and certainly less tiresome than if she had spent page after page pillorying them.
Somethingarchy 