Melissa Katsoulis

This book takes us on a tour of famous literary hoaxes starting with Dionysius and his fake Sophocles through the Hilter Diaries and on to James Frey. The book does distinguish between hoaxes and plagiarism and explains the basic reasons people perpetrate hoaxes and then in very organized segments and chronologically arranged chapters, gives the reader a short taste of the various hoaxes.
I really wanted to love this book but the truth is I didn’t. The writing was a little “textbook” (which this book does not pretend to be) so it did not flow for me as well as it could have and left me skimming over parts, when a more entertaining writing style might have had me captivated.
That being said I still think it is a worthwhile to pick up from the library and get an overview of some important literary history. Two things this book did successfully was peak my interest in a couple of the hoaxes enough for me so that I will be exploring them a little more thoroughly and, truly amaze me at the tenacity, dedication, patience and sheer chutzpah these hoaxers had to carry out their schemes. Goodness only knows what might have been created if they had put their creative talents to legitimate use.
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Quite a disappointing book. Literary hoaxes are a fascinating topic, and a good history of them would be very interesting. But that's not what Melissa Katsoulis gives us with Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes (2009). Instead we get a collection of potted, repetitive summaries of a few literary hoaxes from William Lauder to James Frey, completely bereft of any citations whatsoever. Given the subject it doesn't seem possible to make a volume like this boring, but Katsoulis has done a pretty good job of that.

I found it fairly odd, given that she begins her collection intentionally in the eighteenth century, that Katsoulis doesn't include George Psalmanazar (which would certainly qualify). Odder still are some of the other decisions made about what to include or not. Justifying her criteria, Katsoulis writes "Others, like Thomas J. Wise and James Collier, are not included because their rather pedestrian projects must be called forgeries rather than hoaxes" (p. 1) While I'm fine with her not including forgeries, there are a couple bits of that sentence with which I must take issue. First, it's John Payne Collier, not James; second, pedestrian? I can think of many adjectives to describe what Wise and Collier did, but pedestrian is certainly not among them. (Not to mention the fact that several examples of forgeries, and rather less sophisticated ones at that, are included in the book).

Throughout the text there are various small oddities. She seems (p. 26) to equate anonymous publication (in this case of Walpole's The Castle of Otranto) with hoaxing, which is something of a stretch, and Katsoulis proffers a somewhat strange theory that Australia has produced a "disproportionate number" of hoaxes (p. 10), but without offering very much in the way of evidence for this conclusion (other than highlighting just about all the Australian hoaxers she can find). Errors in spelling, grammar, and usage were not infrequent, and the organization of the book struck me as rather strange: first we get chronological chapters (eighteenth and nineteenth-century hoaxes), then things get rather jumbled: Native Americans, Celebrity Testaments, Australia, Memoirs, Post-Modern Ventriloquists, Holocaust Memoirs, Religion, and finally Entrapment Hoaxes).

All this is not to say that Katsoulis' book is entirely without merit. There are some interesting bits and pieces, and some decent short introductions to various hoaxes. But if you're actually interested in these things, you may want to look for a different book (one which at least has some reference notes might be a place to start).… (more)

First published at Booking in Heels.

Telling Tales is a collection of some of the most interesting literary hoaxes committed in the last two centuries, neatly arranged each under its own subheading and then arranged by subject, motive or century. Katsoulis explores the different types of hoax along with possible reasons or motive behind the scam.

There's a wide range of topic covered, some more interesting than others. My favourite was definitely the chapter that covered Celebrity Hoaxes, like the Hitler Diaries or the autobiography of Howard Hughes. I knew a tiny bit about both of these already, but it was great to expand my knowledge. That's the wonderful thing, I think - this book covers everything from famous hoaxes like the above to smaller, every-day scams like those fake 'misery-memoirs' you see so often on supermarket shelves.

I'm not entirely sure every single story deserved to be in here though. There's quite a lot about books written by authors under a different name or using a different photo, and I don't really see anything wrong with that. A story is a story, no matter who it's told by. As long as it's not masquerading as non-fiction, I don't see the harm. That said, I didn't realise Go Ask Alice, the coming-of-age novel about sex and drugs, was written by a middle-aged, middle-class, white woman. Considering the infamy that book has gathered, it was quite a revelation to me.

It would have been nice if the chapter groupings were a little more consistent. Some are arranged by date, some by topic and some by motive and it gets a little annoying. Either write chronologically or by topic, don't chop and change! It's not difficult!

I found it strange that there was no conclusion, bibliography or author information, but this is clearly meant to be a fun read, not an academic tome. That said, the author presupposes you already have a lot of literature-related knowledge, like the complete works of any given author. It's a strange mix, like using sock puppets to explain one concept and then explaining the next in Ancient Arabic at 400 wpm.

The information and tone of this book are great, but I do think the formatting and grouping could be improved a little. The author's leaps of faith also bothered me a tiny bit, as she kept saying the words 'no doubt that...' and 'we can assume that...' and she never cites her references. That said, it's a great read that you can either dip into or sit down and read it in a day (like I did).… (more)