Stumbling across a long-lost treasure, single mother Jesse Braddock must figure out how to keep it out of the hands of villains, while Ken Bortle, to lure tourists to his failing store, invents the "Everglades Melon Monster," inspiring a horde of TikTokers to swarm the swamp, inciting mayhem and hilarity.

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon - the legacy of P.T. Barnum's 'humbug' culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump's 'fake news'. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like joice heth, a black woman whome he pretended...

"The lives of four artists are forever altered by the desires, protests, and ambitions that lure and unsettle them in this magnetic novel. It's 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarified bubble, dreaming only of disproving the notion that in art, everything has already been done. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old...

Geronimo is taking his Benjamin on a trip to Rome to learn the city's history (and keep him from failing fifth grade), but when they arrive they are immediately pulled into the investigation of the "ghost" of a gladiator that seems to be haunting the Colosseum and scaring tourists away.

"The McNeil family has always been professional hoaxers--tricking bystanders into believing they're seeing legendary creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Unlike the rest of his family, twelve-year-old Grayson hates hoaxing and wants nothing to do with the business--even when the McNeils land a huge job and must pull off four sea monster hoaxes in a week. But when things go disastrously wrong and Dad and Gramps go missing, Grayson and...

"Paroled felon, rich doctor's wife, famous clairvoyant. Cassie Chadwick, one of history's most successful con artists, was a master of reinvention. In the dusk of the Gilded Age, she swept from town to town, assuming fresh identities to swindle a fortune so large that it rivaled the robber barons of the time. Then came arguably the greatest con in American history. Using forged documents and her peerless wits, Cassie convinced prominent men from Cleveland...

"A follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, editor Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley return with Be Gay, Do Crime, a celebration of queer chaos from an all-queer author lineup featuring Myriam Gurba, Emily Austin, Alissa Nutting, and francesca ekwuyasi. A trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she's had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group...

Describes the panic induced when listeners believed Orson Welles' radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" to be news of an alien invasion, discussing the context in which the broadcast was aired and why it was so convincing.

On the morning of July 12, 2017, the FBI Boston field office receives what appears to be a hoax call: a man rescued from the waters off Massachusetts has claimed that his sailboat was hijacked and used to smuggle weapons and terrorists into the United States. With local agents tasked to prepare for an evening Presidential visit to downtown Boston, and with procedures requiring a response to any threat, no matter how unreliable it may seem, FBI administrative...