**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.
