Some names may be new to readers (George Psalmanazar) while others will be painfully familiar (Rachel Dolezal). Young tackles the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Spiritualism (a movement, originating in the 1840s, which seeks to contact the dead), a slew of fake memoirs and forgeries, plagiarism, imposture-and all related crimes. It is also a diagnosis of America’s present condition, which, to borrow Young’s words, is one of “forced forgetting in which the most immediate facts are displaced and denied in favor of older ones that claim a long neglected past, a newfound Neverland.”īunk chronicles hoaxes and humbugs around the world, paying special attention to that font of fakery, America.

Poet and polymath Kevin Young’s newest book, Bunk, unites a history of “post-facts and fake news” with sociocultural analysis, rumination, and literary criticism.