Norma Khouri's bestseller Honor Lost (published in Australia where Khouri now lives as Forbidden Love) tells the story of a Jordanian 'honor killing.' Dalia, a young woman, falls in love with a Christian man and is murdered for this transgression by her father in order to defend the 'honor' of the family. It's a shocking story, and Khouri has always insisted that it's entirely true. She claims that she lived in Jordan for many years and personally knew Dalia. But the Sydney Morning Herald has done a lot of investigative work into Khouri's background and is now alleging that Khouri's story is far more fiction than fact. They put it more bluntly: "Norma Khouri is a fake, and so is Forbidden Love." Among their accusations: the Dalia character never existed, and Khouri herself grew up outside of Chicago (contradicting her claims that she grew up in Jordan). Khouri completely denies all these claims, but the editors of the Sydney Morning Herald seem pretty confident that she's a fake, predicting that "Khouri's hoax will take its place in a long Australian tradition of literary fraud, from Ern Malley to Helen Darville-Demidenko."
Emily Chesley was a "speculative fiction writer of the late Victorian period (who lived for some time in the London, Ontario region), who has been long-overlooked by Canadian literature." She was also a "poet, social activist, explorer, aviatrix, and 92-year-old pole vaulter." The Emily Chesley Reading Circle is a "group of 'scholars' and bon-vivants" who get together to study and help promote her work. So far, they've been quite successful. They've even managed to get an abridged collection of some of her writings published. However, I think the key word in all these descriptions of her was that she was a very 'speculative' writer... i.e. speculative as in nonexistent.
Roman Kingsley is an Australian man who has trained geese to do skywriting, or 'birdtyping' as he calls it. Impossible, you say? Not at all, according to Kingsley. As he says in this interview, "It normally takes about three months to train the birds to spell out a word. Once each bird knows the letter, they have to know where in the word that letter occurs. But I’m hoping to speed it up more in the future. The curved letters, you know, like o, c, and b take the birds a bit longer. But it’s early days." His plan is to have his birds spell out various corporate logos. Volvo is his first client (Volkswagen passed on the offer). He's going for clients with straight letters in their name. In the future he even hopes to have the geese squawk on cue, to add a sound element to the skywriting. Okay, I wouldn't bet a lot of money on the reality of Kingsley and his skywriting geese, but maybe he is real. I'll let you decide for yourself. He's described in a new book by Australian writer Stephen Banham called Fancy that mixes together factual and fictional stories about typography
Over at whitehouse.org (which is not the website of the whitehouse), there's a page describing a novel, titled Sisters, written by the notoriously prudish Lynne Cheney back in 1981. This must have been in Lynne's wilder days because the book is apparently a sexy tale set on the American frontier involving brothels, attempted rapes, and lesbian love affairs. According to this news report, a publisher was going to reissue the book, but was blocked from doing so by Ms. Cheney. 'Goo' sent me the links to these pages and asked if the book was real. At first I was suspicious because I couldn't find it listed in any library catalogs, or on used book sites such as abebooks.com. But then I found it listed on Amazon (no copies are available, but some of the reader comments are quite amusing). So I'm assuming it's real.
Naked Came the Stranger, the hoax novel penned in 1969 by 24 reporters from Newsday, is being re-released by Barricade Books as a 'cult classic.' The movie rights to the book have also been bought.
