The "50 Shades" of 1969. Except this one was intentionally bad.
March 1, 2013 10:30 PM   Subscribe

Naked Came The Stranger was a collaborative work of terrible erotica released as a satire of the all too American love for stories of bored suburban women getting their freak on. Perhaps surprising no one, it became a huge hit anyways. Released as the work of a single female author, the ruse of it being written by a large pool mostly male journalists coming out some time later spurred further sales and cemented its place in the annals of literary hoaxes.
posted by mediocre (12 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
It did occur to me to go for the all-too-easy pun and going with a 'whoops' misspelling of annals.. but I have a feeling I would be able to hear the Boos coming at me from rightly unamused MeFites.
posted by mediocre at 10:34 PM on March 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Because many unamused MeFites are extremely annal.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:47 PM on March 1, 2013 [3 favorites]


reported by Ann Althouse, whose blog serves as a replicant of intelligent discourse with commentators to match. Just check the second, third, fourth, well, basically all of the comments. And the other blog posts.

I'd believe that Althouse itself was a scam of a supposedly-intelligent lawprof put together by second-tier thinkers (Paul Campos maybe?) except for my friends who had her as a professor and really actually loved her. And her son who posts here and by all accounts is a good guy. Shows you what I know.
posted by allen.spaulding at 12:06 AM on March 2, 2013


Poo.
posted by iamkimiam at 12:24 AM on March 2, 2013


The '50 Shades' comparison doesn't really work- E. L. James hasn't outed her hoax yet.
posted by dunkadunc at 12:33 AM on March 2, 2013 [1 favorite]


Here's another article I found on this. (Admittedly, I was looking for excerpts from the book).

And I also found this bit about another crowd-sourced erotica, somewhat uh, inspired by Naked Came the Stranger.
posted by iamkimiam at 12:36 AM on March 2, 2013




McGrady co-wrote Linda Lovelace's memoir Ordeal.
posted by brujita at 3:00 AM on March 2, 2013


See also Atalanta Nights by "Travis Tea" - a sting operation on the PublishAmerica vanity press who were claiming they had standards and did editing. A couple of dozen sci fi writers and editors combining to write the worst novel they possibly could starting with giving each author a separate chapter and only a very vague outline of the "plot" (one of the authors being a computer). Needless to say it was accepted.
posted by Francis at 5:34 AM on March 2, 2013


Journalists? First I've heard of that. There were several poets among the writers. At one point it was rumored that James Dickey and R.H.W.Dillard were among them. Or at least that's what a poet told me back then.
posted by CCBC at 2:58 PM on March 2, 2013


There's evidently a DVD version of a 1970s era adaptation of the Penelope Ashe book.
posted by jonp72 at 5:19 PM on March 2, 2013 [1 favorite]


My oldest brother became a reporter for Newsday shortly after the hoax was planned and while it was being written. When he died, I inherited his books, among which is a signed copy of Naked Came the Stranger.

The inscriptions read:

To Jerry, who most certainly would have been invited to write a chapter if he had been here when the idea was hatched. And who coped with all kinds of crap and wrote a fine story on the hoax.
Harvey Aronson

To Jerry, who just turned 30 and is now old enough to read this kind of thing.
Mike McGrady 20-August-1969


Ironically, he was also good friends with Jacqueline Susann, who gave him a solid gold ankh like the one she is wearing here - one of 100 that she gave out. I have that too.
posted by caryatid at 1:29 PM on March 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


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