There's a moment in every great magic trick — and every great story — when you know you're being deceived, and you lean in anyway. You want to be fooled. That's not a character flaw. It might actually be the most human thing about us.
Looking across the literary conversation happening right now, something keeps surfacing: a fascination with illusion, misdirection, and the strange pleasure of being misled. From a profile of close-up magician Ricky Jay to the resurfaced story of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, from ambivalent Irish homecomings to stories about desire that evaporates the moment you grasp it — literature keeps circling back to the gap between what appears to be true and what actually is.
The Moon Hoax of 1835 is worth pausing on. Published in the New York Sun , a series of articles claimed that astronomer John Herschel had discovered bat-winged humanoids living on the moon. It was completely fabricated. And it worked — spectacularly. Circulation soared. Readers wanted to believe.