> He hadn’t heard the story because it never happened. Debunkers, including Snopes, soon pointed out that The Paris Review for Young Readers had originated in 2015 as an April Fools’ Day joke. There had been only a single issue of the “magazine,” which included a rewrite of American Psycho focused on haute couture lunchboxes, a word hunt that featured terms like chiaroscuro and post hoc ergo propter hoc, and a photo of the editor reading to an avid crowd of children, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Though few had fallen for the Carle interview at first sight, the passage about the stomachache dispute had been republished in a 2019 book, Fierce Bad Rabbits, and its appearance in print, out of context, gave it a legitimacy that was hard to shake. Clare Pollard, the book’s author, had cleared the citation with the Review and a prominent literary agency. But institutional memory lapses quickly, and neither party knew to inform her that it was a hoax.
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