Saturday, March 21, 2009

Fake Holocaust Memoir Contest

Are you kidding me? I am speechless.

3 comments:

Casey said...

This is obviously twisted... do you think it's more or less offensive than fake slave narratives, though, which exist in volumes?

Weird.

Monica said...

Well, I don't really know anything about fake slave narratives--I didn't even realize it was an issue. I guess I would wonder what the intention is, but, still, if you're writing a memoir and it turns out you are lying, I have a problem with that. Why not write fiction? Is that the situation with slave narratives--they were supposed to be memoir and it turned out they weren't?

I suppose HEEB magazine, through this contest, is attempting to critique the growing epidemic of "fake" memoirs, but I think what may be more problematic to me is how they're going about it. It just feels creepy. Then again, I'm not even convinced that this is a real contest.

Casey said...

Yeah, it's obviously crappy... turns out there's a booming fake Native American memoir industry too:

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_04_012649.php