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Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young

Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News

by Kevin Young
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Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9781555977917
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Graywolf Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Graywolf Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 480
  • Original Price: USD 30.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 998 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions, Cultural & Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies, and United States / 20th Century

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction

"There Kevin Young goes again, giving us books we greatly need, cleverly disguised as books we merely want. Unexpectedly essential."--Marlon James

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue's gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers--from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What Is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution.

Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. In this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of "truthiness" where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.

Young, Kevin: - Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, most recently For the Confederate Dead, winner of the Quill Award in Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement. He is also the author of Dear Darkness and Jelly Roll, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of four other volumes, including Everyman Pocket Poets Blues Poems and Jazz Poems, and the Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems. He is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

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true crime > con artists, hoaxes & deceptions

social science > cultural & ethnic studies / american / african american & black studies

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