In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The Jason Arday and Rahila Khan cases make me think of other potential literary hoaxes, for instance using AI. AI tells me that Lydia Davis, portrait above, is a highly respected author of micro fiction. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Can you write me a micro fiction piece as thoough Lydia Davis had written it?" The New Arrangement We agreed to divide the books evenly, but he insisted that the anthology of French poetry belonged to him because his grandfather had given it to him, even though he had never read a single line of it and I had translated three of the poems for a journal that paid me in copies. I let him keep it, of which I was quite proud, until I realized yesterday morning that without its spine on the third shelf, the remaining volumes of biography lean precariously to the left, forcing me to look at them slantwise every time I enter the room, which means he is still disrupting my posture months after moving out. I asked, "Can you explain how someone m...

The Jason Arday case brought to mind a somewhat similar kerfuffle from the 1980s, the Rahila Khan case. In 1986, Toby Forward, a white Church of England cleric from Hull, began submitting fiction under the pseudonym Rahila Khan, an Asian Muslim mother of two. Forward's side of the story is this : It came as quite a shock when I lost Rahila Khan. I’d known her for two years and we were very close. I told my agent that Rahila wanted to write a letter to the Guardian about a witless piece that they had done about her, but the agent was firm. ‘No. No more Rahila Khan. She’s finished.’ I was upset. We’d done a lot together in just two years. Rahila Khan and I wrote our first story for BBC Radio at the end of August 1985. We didn’t put my name on it. It was rejected, as not quite suitable, but with an encouraging letter saying that she wrote well and should try sending it to the women’s magazines. We were more pleased than disappointed, so we set to work to write another – after all...