Here’s the thirty second installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #32: Pranks With a Novel Twist — An Interview with Elusive Wu Ming
By W.J. Elvin III
September 25, 2009

The counter-cultural creative arts collective Wu Ming, based in Italy, evolved out of the madcap Luther Blissett phenomenon (see LiteratEye #15).

Blissett scattered into a million little pieces, becoming an incredible world-wide prank epidemic. For a time it seemed everyone was doing bizarre creative “actions” and attributing them to Blissett.

Then some members of the group that launched the Blissett project morphed into Wu Ming.

Apparently they are now four culturally revolutionary Italian novelists cranking out very popular books.

Being anonymous – the name means “no name” in Mandarin – they are only identified by number, Wu Ming1 through Wu Ming5.

Right. And we just said there are four of them. Well, one of them must have dropped out. Or something. (more…)

Here’s the fifteenth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #15: Wu Ming Re-Visions American History
By W.J. Elvin III
May 22, 2009

So you’ve got this American Revolution-era historical novel weighted toward the Iroquois point of view, written by four anonymous Italian guys who call themselves Wu Ming. Formula for a best-seller or what?

Let’s start with “or what?”

The English language version of Manituana isn’t out yet, though you can get in line for it at Amazon. So, not reading Italian, I can’t say if it really has the best-seller qualities mentioned by those who have read it. It may well be a page-turner of the Dan Brown sort, with the welcome added element of intellectual stimulation, as has been suggested.

Wu Ming has had previous successes under that name and other hits writing as Luther Blissett.

ArtofthePrank readers may recall Blissett as a collective counter-cultural commotion of the 1990s wherein artists, pranksters, protestors, writers and others identified themselves as Blissett.

Luther Blissett, a soccer player from Jamaica, was victim of racial slurs while playing for an Italian team. At first he wasn’t pleased with the craze surrounding his name, but eventually he got into the spirit of it. Some excerpts from his appearance on a BBC program can be found on a rather poor quality but definitely bizarre YouTube clip: (more…)