Books like My Life as a Fake

"Who cares about poetry? Fifty people in Australia? Ten with minds you might respect"- Peter Carey, My Life as a FakeI love Peter Carey. If every artist is indeed a thief, Carey is a literary larcenist. I've read three of his novels this year and all were fantastic and all seemed to be written by an inspired ventriloquist who juggles voice-to-voice, scene-to-scene, on a tightrope of his own fancy. He steals stories from the headlines, from history, and bends them and reshapes them to explore themes of art, identity, ideas and ideals. It is messy metafiction. It isn't absolutely fiction. It isn't asolutely origional, but it is entirely strange and magical.