Stephanie Meyer has said that the idea for the Twilight series came to her in a dream, but it may as well have come to her in a graduate seminar. There are, after all, few other contexts where so much cultural baggage comes together under the sign of so many backpacks. 

New Moon, the latest film installment of the colossally popular franchise, opened this past weekend, breaking box office records and putting reviewers everywhere to work. What, everyone is asking, is Twilight "really" about?

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