The true identity of the authors of Believeniks!, a nonfiction account of the New York Mets 2005 baseball season, published in April by Doubleday, was recently reported by New York Magazine. The pseudonymous authors, Harry Conklin and Ivan Felt, were revealed to be novelists Jonathan Lethem (Conklin) and Christopher Sorrentino (Felt).
Lethem and Sorrentino both live in Brooklyn, New York, and went to high school together. Lethem, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, is the author of Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday, 1999), The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday, 2003), and most recently, the essay collection The Disappointment Artist (Doubleday, 2005). Sorrentino is the author of Sound on Sound (Dalkey Archive Press, 1995) and the National Book Award finalist Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
