You Can't Handle the Truth: Fact vs. Fiction and the Fuzziness of Truth in Literature

In one of my weekly strolls through the New York Times, I stumbled across several articles that grabbed my attention.

A class-action lawsuit has been filed against President Jimmy Carter and Simon & Schuster--who published Carter's "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid" in 2006--alleging that the book was "falsely marketed as an accurate account of peace negotiations in the Middle East." David Schoen--the attorney who filed the suit--remarked that "You cannot market it as the absolute truth on something when it's not."

Kathryn Stockett--the author of the best-selling novel, "The Help," is being sued by Ablene Cooper--a 60-year-old woman--who alleges that "one of the book's principal characters, Aibileen Clark, is an unauthorized appropriation of her name and image, which she finds emotionally distressing."