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Q&A | May 20, 2013
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More copies of this ISBNMy Life as a Fakeby Peter Carey
Review-A-Day"In book after book, Peter Carey has proven that he's incapable of writing a dull page. He's a literary Robin Hood, stealing from rich moments of history or literature and giving to poor readers. The brazenness of his recent projects makes their success all the more exciting....Reading his new work, My Life As a Fake, about a celebrated case of fraud after World War II, is like falling into an Escher drawing. With stories nested in stories, narrators narrating the narratives of other narrators ? it all sounds like the kind of poststructural challenge A.S. Byatt would twist into a migraine of complexity, but Carey never forgets that it's about entertaining a reader. As the Booker Prize has noted ? twice ? he's one of the greatest storytellers alive, the perfect qualification for this novel all about storytelling." Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review) "There's lots in My Life as a Fake for scholars to have fun with — questions about identity and authenticity and the cultural anxieties of a colonial society. But Carey's hand is as light as a pickpocket's, and unless you're looking for such things, you won't see them at all; certainly there's less here of obvious weight than in this Australian writer's last novel, the Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang....This is a fabulous book in the original sense of the term — and in the other one, too." Michael Gorra, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Careys My Life as a Fake is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious manuscript Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose genius? As Sarah tries to secure the manuscript, Chubb draws her into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping, and exile-a story that couldnt be true unless its teller were mad. My Life as a Fake is Carey at his most audacious and entertaining.
Review:"My Life as a Fake...should sit comfortably on a shelf beside Oscar and Lucinda or True History of the Kelly Gang, [Carey's] most accomplished works, even though it seems hastily composed at times." Jay Parini, The Boston Globe
Review:"Given the amply demonstrated brilliance of its author, My Life as a Fake is also replete with its own poetic echoes and allusions....My Life as a Fake is serious about art, but Mr. Carey's down-to-earth Australian wryness is also much in evidence." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review:"[S]o confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling in its plot that something, we feel, must be wrong with it....Carey's prose is up to any task he sets it." John Updike, The New Yorker
Review:"Delectably suspenseful and wildly inventive, Carey's spellbinding modern Gothic is a shrewd and seductive inquiry into the diabolical dimension of the imagination." Booklist
Review:"Carey's corker of a plot...delivers surprise after surprise and peaks with a masterly extended set-piece....Issues of artistic inspiration, integrity, and authenticity are thus brilliantly allegorized in a wonderland of a yarn....A Nabokovian masterpiece." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis:Using as a springboard a real literary hoax that transfixed Australia in his boyhood, Peter Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how a phantom poet taunts, haunts, and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing him from Melbourne to a seedy, sweaty, bitter ending in the tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur.
About the AuthorPeter Carey was born in Australia in 1943 and now lives in New York City with his family. The author of seven previous novels and a collection of stories, Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award, the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book twice, and the Booker Prize twice — for Oscar and Lucinda and for his most recent novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, which was also a finalist for the 2002 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
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