Bart D. Ehrman, the New York Times bestselling author of Jesus, Interrupted and God’s Problem reveals which books in the Bible’s New Testament were not passed down by Jesus’s disciples, but were instead forged by other hands—and why this centuries-hidden scandal is far more significant than many scholars are willing to admit. A controversial work of historical reporting in the tradition of Elaine Pagels, Marcus Borg, and John Dominic Crossan, Ehrman’s Forged delivers a stunning explication of one of the most substantial—yet least discussed—problems confronting the world of biblical scholarship.

Forgery and Counter-forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics is the first major contemporary work on forgery in early Christian literature. It examines the motivation and function behind Christian literary forgeries.

In addition to providing a checklist of 70 treasures from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection, this beautifully-illustrated volume includes five essays that explore the phenomenon of forgery as a creative literary form and provide an interesting and informative sense of the broader collection. With nearly 1,700 individual items, the Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection is the largest and most comprehensive collection of books and manuscripts of forgery in the world. Highlights include editions of Jesus' posthumous "Letter from Heaven," eyewitness accounts of the Fall of Troy, annotated books from Shakespeare's personal library, Alpine inscriptions recording Noah's settlement of Vienna after the Flood, and a first-hand account of the discovery of Homer's tomb. The collection was assembled over a 50-year period and acquired by the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University in 2011. Exhibition: Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts, Baltimore, USA (05.10.2014 - 01.02.2015).

A brutal murder incites paranoia in the rare-book world in a “brilliantly written . . . lethally enthralling” novel of literary suspense (Joyce Carol Oates). The bibliophile community is stunned when a reclusive collector, Adam Diehl, is found on the floor of his Montauk home: hands severed, surrounded by valuable inscribed books and original manuscripts that have been vandalized beyond repair. Adam’s sister, Meghan, and her lover, Will—a convicted if unrepentant literary forger—struggle to come to terms with the incomprehensible murder. But when Will begins receiving threatening handwritten letters, seemingly penned by Henry James and A. Conan Doyle, he’s drawn into a web of deception with which he’s unnervingly familiar. Yet this time, it’s putting his own life in jeopardy. “From its provocative opening line . . . [The Forgers] takes on a knowing, nourish tone, like a crime movie by the Coen brothers” (The Miami Herald), while “quite skillfully, paying homage to one of Agatha Christie’s most famous whodunits. Yet even then, [Morrow] offers a few twists of his own and will keep all but the most astute mystery aficionado guessing . . . until the end” (The Washington Post).

An audacious memoir by a down-on-her-luck writer, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" is Israel's story of the astonishing literary forgeries she conceived and successfully executed for almost two years.

“The essays gathered in this volume demonstrate that studying early modern European literary forgeries is a fascinating cultural adventure” (Lina Bolzoni author of The Gallery of Memory). This comprehensive study of literary and historiographical forgery goes well beyond questions of authorship. It spotlights the imaginative vitality of forgery and its sinister impact on genuine scholarship. This volume demonstrates that early modern forgery was a literary tradition in its own right, with distinctive connections to politics, Greek and Roman classics, religion, philosophy, and modern literature. The early modern explosion in forgery of all kinds—particularly in the fields of literary and archaeological falsification—demonstrates a dramatic shift in attitudes toward historical evidence and in the relation of texts to contemporary society. The authors capture the impact of this evolution within many cultural transformations, including the rise of print, changing tastes and fortunes of the literary marketplace, and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The thirteen essays draw on Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva, the world’s premier research collection dedicated exclusively to the subject of literary forgery. It consists of several thousand rare books and unique manuscript materials from the early modern period and beyond. Contributors: Frederic Clark, James Coleman, Richard Cooper, Arthur Freeman, Anthony Grafton, A. Katie Harris, Earle A. Havens, Jack Lynch, Shana D. O’Connell, Ingrid Rowland, Walter Stephens, Elly Truitt, Kate Tunstall

Right from the beginning, classical literature has been embroiled with questions of authenticity, fakes, frauds, and, of course, scandal. Issues of dubious authorship, and contested authority confront philologists, critics and publishers today as surely as they did in the classical era itself. The new era of postmodernism, however, encourages us to look at the work of the forger with fresh eyes, and recent scholarship reflects this in an interdisciplinary approach which goes well beyond the conventional academic endeavor to separate the authentic from the fake. Fakes and Forgers of Classical Literature comprises essays from an international cast of scholars who, in their diverse and creative approaches to questions of authenticity both old and new, radically revise the position of the forged text in the literary tradition and, in light of modern approaches of philology and literary criticism, offer exciting new strategies for understanding forgery and the play with authenticity within ancient literature itself.

"The Deceivers explores the intersections among artistic crime, literary narrative, and the definition of identity. Through close reading of literary narratives such as Trilby and The Marble Faun as well as newspaper accounts of forgery scandals, The Deceivers reveals the identities - both authentic and fake - that emerged from the Victorian culture of forgery."--BOOK JACKET.