Other literary hoaxes

Margaret B. Jones, "Love and Consequences" (2008).

Misha Defonseca, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years" (1997). The bestselling book was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France. Through her lawyers, the Belgian-born author admitted to the Boston Globe

on Feb. 28 that her story of trekking across Europe with a pack of wolves during the Holocaust wasn't true. She not only did not make the journey with a pack of wolves in search of her deported Jewish parents during World War II, but she also isn't Jewish. The 71-year-old writer now lives in Dudley, Mass. In the statement released by her lawyers, Defonseca said that her real name is Monique De Wael and that she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents. She said they were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters.

James Frey, "A Million Little Pieces" (2003). Frey's bestselling "memoir," an Oprah Winfrey pick, was revealed to be largely a fabrication in January 2006 by the Smoking Gun website. The website disproved Frey's claim to have been jailed for crashing his car while drunk and high on crack cocaine, then hitting a police officer. Frey later said he was having trouble selling his fiction project and instead turned it into a memoir.

JT LeRoy, an HIV-positive former drug addict and hustler in his 20s, was revealed to be New York writer Laura Albert, who said she invented the androgynous persona of LeRoy in therapy a few days after the Frey hoax was revealed. The elaborate hoax lasted several years through numerous books, including the bestselling novels "Sarah" and "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things."

Tom Carew, "Jihad! Jihad!: The Secret War in Afghanistan" (2001). Carew claimed to have been a covert agent for Britain's Special Air Services in Afghanistan in 1980 during the Soviet invasion of that country. In fact, Carew is the pen name of Philip Anthony Sessarego, a former member of the Royal Artillery, and he never served in the SAS.

Nasdijj, "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams" (2000), "The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping" (2003) and "Geronimo's Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me" (2004). The award-winning writer claimed to be a Navajo who, as a child, was a migrant worker with self-destructive and abusive parents. Hailed as a powerful writer on the Native American experience, Nasdijj was unmasked by an LA Weekly article in 2006 that revealed him to be Timothy Patrick Barrus.