Letter from the editor.

As we pass the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the various ways in which the Holocaust has been represented have of course changed, their form and content evolving. In this issue Paul Maliszewski--a student of one particular genre attendant to Holocaust literature, the fraudulent survivor memoir--reports on novelist Michael Chabon's use of a made-up anecdote relating a boyhood friendship with one such charlatan author. Maliszewski examines what's at stake in Chabon's manipulation--a question germane to both memoirs and novels, as well as to the particular domestication of the Holocaust in America.

What's real and what's fake is at issue, too, for Emmanuel Carrere in his book The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, which tells the tale of one of history's great dissemblers, the murderous Jean-Claude Romand. Gary Indiana investigates how the novel's form frames "real events more potently than quotidian reportage or generic crime 'nonfiction.'"

For Hunter S. Thompson, reality was something made to be manipulated, both in the journalism he practiced and in the life he led. We're proud to feature in this issue a conversation with the artist Thompson will always be associated with, Ralph Steadman, as much a part of the gonzo legacy as the writer's methed-up writing. To Hunter: Wherever you wound up in the afterworld, we hope that you like the conversation, and that you're still giving Nixon hell.

Editorially yours,

Eric Banks