Fake Covers for Fake Books by a Fake Writer. Yes!
by Tom Nissley
Omnivoracious.com
(A blog run by the books editors at Amazon.com)
April 20, 2008

Somebody knows exactly where my buttons are, and is pushing them. As much as I love Paris Review interviews and fake writers, I may have an even softer spot for fake writers, their fake books, and their fake book covers, and Nathaniel Rich’s promotional site for his new novel, The Mayor’s Tongue, having indulged the first, has now granted me the latter, with a full (and growing) gallery of covers of the various fictitious editions of the fictious writer Constance Eakins’s fictitous books, contributed by some sharp designers and illustrators. And it’s not just the idea of it, but the covers themselves, often period pieces that are not only spot-on but gorgeous in their own right. I love, for instance, Zach Dodson’s vintage Penguin pb of Humboldt in the Amazon. But I really adore Joanna Neborsky’s often Brit-feeling covers, of which it was hard to choose just two lovelies to feature above. I think Flowers, Flowers, Eat All the Flowers is my favorite, but I had to include Songs for Agata too because I am certain I bought a copy of that one for $5 in Philadelphia in 1988. It must be on my shelves somewhere…

But my real favorite is Ben Gibson’s full-jacket treatment of The Uncles Ten (below), which I must confess I am fairly desperate to read (I imagine it in the Flann O’Brien vein…). (more…)

This Column Is Real, But Not All Authors Stick to the Truth
Deja Vu, by Cynthia Crossen
Wall Street Journal
April 7, 2008

A popular choice for ladies’ book clubs in the early 1940s was a slim volume of poetry by a 10-year-old girl named Fern Gravel. Fern had written the poems about her Iowa hometown in 1900 and passed them along to someone who had preserved them. In 1940, Fern Gravel decided to publish her nostalgic rhymes under the title, “Oh Millersville!”

Two snippets: “My Sunday-school teacher/Is Miss Minnie King./She is not of any use as a teacher/But I love to hear her sing.” “The soap they use in the Commercial hotel/Is awful; it has a horrible smell./Sometimes we have our Sunday dinner there/And the smell of their soap I can hardly bear.”

Critics were enchanted. The Des Moines Register praised the poems’ “warm feeling of validity.” Time magazine called the author a “precocity in pigtails.” The St. Paul Dispatch said “Oh Millersville!” was marked “for immortality.” And the book became the profit center for its small Iowa publisher, Prairie Press.

Six years later, Fern Gravel confessed: She was really James Norman Hall, co-author of the “Bounty” trilogy. In a 1946 article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Mr. Hall described himself as “shame-faced and apologetic,” but claimed that Fern had come to him in a dream and dictated her poems to him.

Literary hoaxes are almost as old as literature. Some have been inspired by poverty, others are simply pranks. (more…)

A Family Tree of Literary Fakers
by Motoko Rich
New York Times
March 8, 2008

When the news emerged this week that Margaret Seltzer had fabricated her gang memoir, “Love and Consequences,” under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, many in the publishing industry and beyond thought: Here we go again.

The most immediate examples that came to mind were, of course, James Frey, the author of the best-selling “Million Little Pieces,” in which he embellished details of his experiences as a drug addict, and J T LeRoy, the novelist thought to be a young West Virginia male prostitute who was actually the fictive alter ego of Laura Albert, a woman now living in San Francisco.

But the history of literary fakers stretches far, far back, at least to the 19th century, when a slave narrative published in 1863 by Archy Moore was revealed as a novel written by a white historian, Richard Hildreth, and into the early 20th, when Joan Lowell wrote a popular autobiography, “Cradle of the Deep,” about her colorful childhood aboard a four-masted ship sailing the South Seas; in fact, she had grown up almost entirely in Berkeley, Calif.

Here follows a lineup of some of the past few decades’ most notorious fakes, with proof that in some cases, there are second acts in American lives. (more…)

Caveat emptor: Robert Hilferty, critic for Bloomberg News talked with Clifford Irving about “The Hoax” movie. Irving also writes about the movie (which he says he has not seen) on his Web site, where you can download a pdf version of “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes”. A few chapters are free. The whole book is $5.95 which he says, “is a discount of $154 from the Amazon.com price,” although as of today, the book is unavailable on Amazon.com.

Clifford Irving Faked Hughes Book for Fun, Derides ‘Hoax’ Film
By Robert Hilferty

April 25 (Bloomberg) — Clifford Irving, who spent more than a year in prison after writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes in the 1970s, says the new Richard Gere film about the hoax is also phony.

“From the first time I read the script, I thought it was a silly, defamatory story about a crackpot, desperate man who by some coincidence bears the same name as mine,” Irving, 76, said last week in a telephone interview from his home in Aspen, Colorado. The movie is supposedly based on his own account, “The Hoax,” written before he went to jail.

Hilferty: Do you consider the “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes” to be your masterpiece?

Irving: No. It’s just a very good book. I’ve written better books, but the autobiography is unique insofar as it is a novel in the form of an autobiography. It’s the most famous unpublished book in America.

Hilferty: It certainly took a lot creativity to make up those conversations.

Irving: We didn’t make them up. We actually had the conversations. My friend Dick Suskind and I set a Sony tape recorder on the table and we’d switch playing the roles of Howard Hughes and Clifford Irving. We got into it as actors. (more…)

From Steffani Martin:

Author JT Leroy hoaxed many people with “autobiographical” novels and stories based on his tragic youth as a transvestite prostitute. He got the sympathy of many famous people, and some hot book and movie deals until it came out that “he” is a middle class woman who made it all up to gain publicity for her career in the rock music business.

Warren St. James, of The New York Times exposed the hoax (see article below) as did New York Metro.com writer Stephen Beachy (also available from Susie Bright’s blog). Susie Bright discusses the hoax further here. (more…)

Submitted by Erin Clermont:

I was obsessed by Clifford Irving back in the day. And I happened to be working at CBS News, so I got the dope on a daily basis. My obsession was based on my unerring (IMHO) instinct that he was lying, from day one, so it was a fantastic experience watching the whole thing unravel, over months, at a network news organization. My boss, Walter Cronkite, wasn’t as interested.

No more than two years later I was working at a literary organization. We didn’t have a receptionist, so whoever was closest to the door answered it. That day I answered a knock and a presentable though borderline seedy guy said, proudly, “I’m Clifford Irving!” I was speechless. All I could think to say was “I always knew you were lying!”–so I passed on the hello.

That face-to-face ranks as one of the most celebrity non-thrill sightings of my life. I still have no respect for Irving. He was a swindler, which is not a “prank” — he went for major bucks, which was $1 million in those days, though it sounds like chump change now. Seeing “The Hoax,” I now realize Irving was fresh out of jail when I met him. Ha. OTOH, the movie made me reasess the quality of the Hughes bio he wrote, which, after all copies were destroyed, has never been reissued. Irving was rather brilliant as a hoax biographer and, using investigative reporter techniques, fashioned a credible biography of the reclusive Hughes.

Gere may have topped his career with this performance. He’s terrific as Irving. Cast in the role of Nina Van Pallandt, who turned her Irving sexual liaison into a Hollywood career, is the delicately beautiful and talented Julie Delpy. Unlikely choice–Nina was a big Nordic beauty. And wasn’t she in Gigolo with Richard Gere? Ironic.

Lots of great, early ’70s decor and props in this film. So-called stock footage is used for a scene of a Washington demo against the Vietnam War. Front and center is a guy who looks just like Joey Skaggs. Coincidence?