# Sting in the Tale [Publisher page](http://www.antoinettelafarge.com/sitt.html) *LaFarge, Antoinette. Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation. DoppelHouse Press, 2021.* ## Description First comprehensive survey of fictive art — a genre in which artists fabricate evidence (documentary photographs and video, created artifacts and relics, explanatory texts, lectures, and expert testimony) to secure a central fiction as fact. Interweaves contemporary fictive-art practice, including artists such as Peter Hill, Iris Häussler, Beauvais Lyons, and Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick, with a longer lineage of hoaxes and impostures dating from the 17th century, from the Cottingley fairy photographs (1917) to the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Codex Seraphinianus. [[Antoinette LaFarge|LaFarge]] coins the term "parafact" for fiction "too strange not to be real," alongside related terms used by other theorists ("superfiction," "parafiction"). ## Key Tags #hoaxes #fictive-art ## Key Passages %% add quoted excerpts with page numbers as they're gathered %% ## Notes by Chapter %% Reading notes organized by the book's own chapter or section structure, to be added %% ## Details 432 pages, softcover, with 16 pages of color plates. Grew out of a *Book Talk Series* (2021–22) pairing [[Antoinette LaFarge|LaFarge]] in conversation with featured artists — Peter Hill, Iris Häussler, Beauvais Lyons and David Daly, Greg Cohen, Lenore Malen, and Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick — sponsored by *Art Report Today*. Reviewed by Heather Jessup in *ESC: English Studies in Canada* 47, no. 4 (2021), already cited in [[Fictive Art and Hoaxes]]. ### Concepts and Theories - [[Fictive Art and Hoaxes]] - central secondary source for the concept; introduces "parafact" as a term for fiction "too strange not to be real" ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Related Individuals - [[Antoinette LaFarge]] - author ## References ### Cited In - [[Fictive Art and Hoaxes]] (210 - Concepts and Theory) - [[Antoinette LaFarge]] (230 - Individuals)