Sleights of Hand: The Deception Issue

Essays, fiction, and poetry reflecting on truth and illusion in a world filled with deceptions both treacherous and benign.

Children deceive, as do grownups, and many are the moments when all of us even deceive ourselves. People of every age and stripe, whether rarely or often, dissimulate, bluff, and beguile. The writer who fabricates and populates worlds is a deceiver, as is the artist whose triumph is to trick the eye, to alter perception. The honest magician's livelihood is based on de...