Photo by Leah MillerHunger Mountain, the literary journal for Vermont College of Fine Arts, has just posted my review of The Runner by writer David Samuels, a biography of con artist James Hogue, who successfully lied his way into Princeton University's class of 1993.  How did a bicycle thief from Kansas gain entry to one of the most exclusive institutions in America?  By using a little thing we like to call fiction, my friends...

"Hogue applied to Princeton University’s Class of 1992 with a personal essay describing his idyllic life as a Mexican-American sheepherder in California. He spoke of reading Whitman, Plato, and Kerouac in a moonlit canyon known as Little Purgatory. He said his mother was an artist residing in Switzerland and that his father was deceased. When Fred Hargadon, then head of Princeton Admissions, was asked to describe his ideal candidate for Princeton, he replied simply, 'Huckleberry Finn.' Hargadon wanted a fictional character, and Hogue made sure he got one. Hogue was admitted and granted a $12,730 track scholarship. Only everything he’d written was pure fiction, including his nom de application—Alexi Indris-Santana."

Check out the full story at Hunger Mountain's Sideways Reviews - http://www.hungermtn.org/sideways-review-how-to-fool-ourselves/ for more on Hogue, a few lies I've told (or tried to tell) in my day, and what all this can teach us about lying and writing fiction.