Paul Maliszewski

This edition of McSweeney's is themed around hoaxes, deceptions and non-truths. The pleasures in reading the more than thirty pieces comes in figuring out if and how you're being fooled. There are articles about real hoaxes, articles about people who perpetrate hoaxes, and stories about imagined hoaxes. This edition is very light on actual fiction, the best being Brian Evenson's story "Moran's Mexico" that cleverly pretends to be a translated work, with translation itself being part of the plot.
This edition was a little hard to get through, even though many of the entries are brief. It's like a box of RaisinBran; you need to get through a lot of roughage to get to the sweet stuff, which is often the case when there are so many pieces. A good third of it I felt was more suitable for McSweeney's humor website.
The physical format is lovely: a sturdy, thick hardbound volume decorated with a bird motif by Elizabeth Kairys. The first page of each piece has an illustration by Marcel Dzarma that doesn't ever match with the content, but they're wonderfully bizarre and ordinary at the same time.… (more)

Engagingly written, the first section of the book into Paul Maliszewski's own writings is both sad and amusing - amusing because so many of the examples he gives are obviously satirical, sad because these articles were believed due to the expectations of their readers and publishers.

The entire book is a tribute to the fraud and fakeries of phony journalism and writing (from deliberate misrepresentation to lazy fact checking and plagiarism which allows the internet-moderated version of gossip and 'chinese whispers' to bring 'reality' to what isn't) to some examples ranging from art fraud to plain cons. Unfortunately (or should that be fortunately?) the result seems to be a bland recitation rather than a study - an impression strengthened by the lack of any kind of bibliography (or even a short index).

The book is a light, generalist introduction to the field (as it were) , but if you are interested in more detailed who/when/where/why you'll want to delve further and I, at least, was left feeling mildly dissatisfied. A read for a day when concentration is low.… (more)