Malba Tahan profile

       In The Guardian Alex Bellos profiles Malba Tahan: the literary hoaxer who made Brazil love maths -- Julio Cesar de Mello e Sousa, who found success with a pseudonym (and more colorful backstory), as he found he did better presenting himself as someone other than himself:

Mello e Sousa invented the name because when as a young man he tried to sell stories to the local newspaper, they were not even read by the newspaper's editors. But when he resubmitted the same stories, saying they were a translation of an American author called R S Slade, a name he made up on the spur of the moment, they were all published.

       Reminiscent of Andreï Makine who, to get his foot in the French literary door, had to pretend the works he submitted were translations from the Russian .....
       The Malba Tahan story is a pretty good one, however -- and his The Man Who Counted is also available in English; see the W.W.Norton publicity page, or get your copy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

       (Bellos also has another version of his profile up at BBC News Magazine: Brazil's other passion: Malba Tahan and The man who counted.)