You might as well have the brain of a tank. You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. Robert Birnbaum: I want to read something to you because it has been on my mind, so please bear with me: In the novel, we travel with a poetry magazine editor, Sara Wode-Douglass, and poet John Slater from England to Australia to Malaysia and are embroiled in a plot of which, as one review gushed, there are ‘echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein…A Nabokovian masterpiece.’ My Life as a Fake is a riveting piece of literature and Peter Carey, as you will see, is an engaging and stimulating conversationalist. Suffice to say, this fantastic (in the real sense of that word) novel is based on an actual literary hoax, the Ern Malley Affair of 1944, that was perpetrated in Carey’s native Australia. Peter Carey lives in New York City with his wife Alison Summers and their two sons, and chairs the Creative Writing Department at Hunter College.Īs Carey attests below, My Life as a Fake resists facile plot summary which, thankfully, lets me off the hook to attempt it.

He is one of only two authors to have won the Booker Prize twice-first for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang-and has also won numerous other awards and prizes.

Australian writer Peter Carey has written eight novels, including the recently published My Life as a Fake, and a collection of short stories: True History of the Kelly Gang, Jack Maggs, The Unusual Life Of Tristan Smith, The Tax Inspector, Oscar and Lucinda, Bliss, Illywhacker, and The Fat Man in History.

The tax inspector peter carey