Short Stories About Liars
June 26, 2022 3:39 PM Subscribe
Can you recommend short stories that focus on characters who are inveterate liars or bullshitters and know it? My best example is Tobias Wolff's "The Liar," or possibly some of the stories in DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I know there are plenty of longer fiction and film/TV examples, and I'm not exactly looking for unsympathetic or puppet-master protagonists, but simply characters in short stories (under 30 pages or so, not children's literature) who are characterized in large part by telling lies and talking about the lying.
I'm sorry this is not a short work, but I can't not recommend the nonfiction book about Tobias Wolff's father by his brother Geoffrey, "The Duke of Deception."
posted by baseballpajamas at 4:34 PM on June 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by baseballpajamas at 4:34 PM on June 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Best answer: This is a self-link to my short story, "An Honest Man".
posted by ShooBoo at 4:38 PM on June 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ShooBoo at 4:38 PM on June 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: On of my favourites:
Or Else by Antonya Nelson.
posted by miles1972 at 4:55 PM on June 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Or Else by Antonya Nelson.
posted by miles1972 at 4:55 PM on June 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
The title novella in Mary Gordon's collection The Liar's Wife. (One of my favorites, by one of my favorite writers.)
posted by virago at 7:40 PM on June 26, 2022
posted by virago at 7:40 PM on June 26, 2022
Deception is an ongoing theme in many of T.C. Boyle's stories. Central characters often lie to others or themselves in some way.
posted by ovvl at 9:08 PM on June 26, 2022
posted by ovvl at 9:08 PM on June 26, 2022
“The Open Window”, by Saki (H.H. Munro)
posted by librosegretti at 9:59 PM on June 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by librosegretti at 9:59 PM on June 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
Best answer: Saki: The Defensive Diamond "I believe I take precedence," he said coldly; "you are merely the club Bore; I am the club Liar."
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:14 PM on June 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:14 PM on June 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
A bit old-school, but perhaps Guy Owens's Flim-Flam Man (short stories, also a film adaptation and a brief TV series based on the film) would be of interest.
posted by humbug at 8:48 AM on June 27, 2022
posted by humbug at 8:48 AM on June 27, 2022
Not short stories exactly but this might be a great resource for you. The Encyclopedia of Liars & Deceivers.
posted by egeanin at 10:52 AM on June 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by egeanin at 10:52 AM on June 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Wow! Great responses, and absolutely exactly what I needed! Here's a little further background and explanation:
In 1997, I had just gotten out of the Army and was in grad school for an MFA in fiction writing in English and read The End of the Story by Lydia Davis for a terrific course in contemporary women's fiction — we also read Carole Maso, Linda Lê, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marguerite Duras, and Clarice Lispector — and found the narrative unreliability of the novel absolutely wonderful. I got funded my second year of the MFA and they put me in front of a College Composition class, and that first day in front of the classroom was life-changing: this is what I want to do with my life, I said. So I finished the MFA and went on to a PhD in rhetoric and composition, but there's still part of me that is totally fascinated by narrative unreliability, by lying, and by the demands college writing professors put on their students to represent some sort of coherent, unified self on the page. I recently put together a MeFi post about some of those problems (we ask students to go about "Inventing the University" in their writing, which means taking on an authorial stance that presents more knowledge and authority than they may actually have in many cases), and this fall I'm teaching a new prep, a 300-level course called "Everyday Rhetorics," and I polled some friends, colleagues and former students about syllabus ideas — the rhetorics of economics, the rhetorics of conspiracies, or the rhetorics of bullshit. Bullshit won by an overwhelming margin.
So I had most of the syllabus put together, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any gems, and thanks to all of you, I won't be! Thank you so much for all the help. Here's the syllabus so far, and you can likely see the less-heavy reading weeks where I'm going to slot in some of your suggestions.
Everyday Rhetorics: Bullshit (English 3xx, Fall 2022)
Week 1: Gorgias, "Encomium of Helen." Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess." James Bridle, "Something Is Wrong on the Internet."
Week 2: Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit. 3 articles on "the Grievance Studies affair."
Week 3: Ali Almossawi, An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics." Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense."
Week 4: Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies. William James, "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth."
Week 5: Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies. Jacques Derrida, "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing."
Week 6: Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies. Henry Louis Gates, "The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g)."
Week 7: midterm conferences; no reading due
Week 8: Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Aldous Huxley, "On Propaganda." George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."
Week 9: Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth.
Week 10: Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth.
Week 11: Cailin O'Connor, The Misinformation Age.
Week 12: Cailin O'Connor, The Misinformation Age.
Week 13: Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language." Tobias Wolff, "The Liar." Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel." Willard Van Orman Quine, "Universal Library."
Week 14: concluding chapters from Merlan and O'Connor
Week 15: project presentations
My challenge now is that this syllabus feels deafeningly, overwhelmingly white to me, and I'd like to remedy that — but that's a different AskMeFi. Thanks to all again, so much!
posted by vitia at 2:47 PM on June 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
In 1997, I had just gotten out of the Army and was in grad school for an MFA in fiction writing in English and read The End of the Story by Lydia Davis for a terrific course in contemporary women's fiction — we also read Carole Maso, Linda Lê, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marguerite Duras, and Clarice Lispector — and found the narrative unreliability of the novel absolutely wonderful. I got funded my second year of the MFA and they put me in front of a College Composition class, and that first day in front of the classroom was life-changing: this is what I want to do with my life, I said. So I finished the MFA and went on to a PhD in rhetoric and composition, but there's still part of me that is totally fascinated by narrative unreliability, by lying, and by the demands college writing professors put on their students to represent some sort of coherent, unified self on the page. I recently put together a MeFi post about some of those problems (we ask students to go about "Inventing the University" in their writing, which means taking on an authorial stance that presents more knowledge and authority than they may actually have in many cases), and this fall I'm teaching a new prep, a 300-level course called "Everyday Rhetorics," and I polled some friends, colleagues and former students about syllabus ideas — the rhetorics of economics, the rhetorics of conspiracies, or the rhetorics of bullshit. Bullshit won by an overwhelming margin.
So I had most of the syllabus put together, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any gems, and thanks to all of you, I won't be! Thank you so much for all the help. Here's the syllabus so far, and you can likely see the less-heavy reading weeks where I'm going to slot in some of your suggestions.
Everyday Rhetorics: Bullshit (English 3xx, Fall 2022)
Week 1: Gorgias, "Encomium of Helen." Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess." James Bridle, "Something Is Wrong on the Internet."
Week 2: Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit. 3 articles on "the Grievance Studies affair."
Week 3: Ali Almossawi, An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics." Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense."
Week 4: Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies. William James, "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth."
Week 5: Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies. Jacques Derrida, "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing."
Week 6: Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies. Henry Louis Gates, "The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g)."
Week 7: midterm conferences; no reading due
Week 8: Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Aldous Huxley, "On Propaganda." George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."
Week 9: Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth.
Week 10: Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth.
Week 11: Cailin O'Connor, The Misinformation Age.
Week 12: Cailin O'Connor, The Misinformation Age.
Week 13: Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language." Tobias Wolff, "The Liar." Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel." Willard Van Orman Quine, "Universal Library."
Week 14: concluding chapters from Merlan and O'Connor
Week 15: project presentations
My challenge now is that this syllabus feels deafeningly, overwhelmingly white to me, and I'd like to remedy that — but that's a different AskMeFi. Thanks to all again, so much!
posted by vitia at 2:47 PM on June 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Hope I'm not too late! This is possibly my most favorite short story: AV Laider by Max Beerhohm.
posted by Taro at 5:00 PM on June 27, 2022
posted by Taro at 5:00 PM on June 27, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by cobaltnine at 4:16 PM on June 26, 2022 [1 favorite]