There is no such Albanian as Jiri Kajane

The Guardian covers a literary hoax, in which several prominent literary magazines published short fiction by “Jiri Kajane,” purportedly a middle-aged Albanian emigre, actually a couple of twenty-something American MFA students.  One of them was a classmate of mine in the fiction program at Johns Hopkins.  Among the students he made no secret of the fact that he was writing stories set in Albania, putting the name “Jiri Kajane” on them, and getting them published in literary magazines.  At the time it seemed like some kind of grandiose participatory performance art and I never thought of spilling the beans.  But every so often I wondered, will this ever get revealed, or will Jiri Kajane become an accepted minor figure in the history of Albanian literature?  Now I know.