My Life as a Fake

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. [viii], 266, [6]. Brown paper boards, lettered and blocked in gilt to spine; pale beige endpapers. Author's Note, Acknowledgements.

A 2003 New York Times Notable Book. Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004. Using as a springboard a real literary hoax that transfixed Australia in the late 1940s – namely that of "Ern Malley", conceived by two talented anti-modernists, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, and whose fabricated verse submitted for publication in the avant-garde literary magazine Angry Penguins resulted in the public humiliation of its editor Max Harris, and the subsequent court trial on charges of obscenity – Peter Carey explores how the phantom poet taunts, haunts and ultimately destroys his maker. "A Nabokovian masterpiece." –Kirkus Reviews