Sadness is general, as is solipsism. Kevin Brockmeier's second collection of stories, The View from the Seventh Layer, comprises four "Fables" and nine other morose and mystical fictions. The book confirms that Brockmeier, who moonlights as a writer of children's books, is as prolific as he is sensitive and sorrowful. Now thirty-five, he has published one previous collection and two novels. His first novel, The Truth about Celia, like many popular national news stories of the past decade, concerned a missing little girl. The Brief History of the Dead, a portion of which appeared in The New Yorker, proceeded from the premise that there is a city where the souls of the deceased dwell for as long as someone alive on earth remembers them; in the course of the novel, the city's population bulges, then dwindles as the planet is ravaged by a world war and then a plague that threatens to wipe out humanity. Read More

You may have seen a small and strange article in last Monday's New York Times, buried beneath the fold in the back of the business section: "Fiction, Hoax or Neither? A Literary Dust-Up." The article reports on an essay by Paul Maliszewski in the April/May issue of Bookforum, in which he argues that a lecture given several times by Michael Chabon constitutes a deliberate and dodgy attempt to hoax his audience. In the lecture, titled "Golems I Have Known," Chabon describes, among other hoaxsters, a Jewish writer writing under a good Waspish pseudonym, CB Colby, who then publishes a Holocaust memoir in his own name, Joseph Adler. But it seems that Adler isn't his real name either, and the author of the memoir is not a survivor but a Nazi named Fischer. As it turns out, Colby/Adler/Fischer never existed, and the fake Holocaust memoir The Book of Hell, which Chabon says is owned by his father, his father-in-law, and perhaps by members of the audience, and from which he goes on to quote a passage, is a novelistic invention of one Michael Chabon. Maliszewski argues that Chabon is taking advantage of his audience's gullibility in order to show off, and thereby edits out history's CB Colby, a real man with no connections to Nazis or Jews whatsoever. In Maliszewski's eyes, this amounts to unethical fiction writing. Read More