O: A Presidential Novel by Anonymous
When you went to a traveling American circus in the nineteenth century, you got scammed. Pay for the freak show, and you’d sometimes be offered the chance, for a bit more money, to see the “Feejee Mermaid.” A real life mermaid! How could you pass this up? You’d pay, walk past the illustrations of some creature out of Hans Christian Andersen, and be greeted by the torso, arms and head of a monkey stitched to the body of a fish. It was compelling taxidermy, but not quite what you paid for.
O: A Presidential Novel is a Feejee Mermaid. Simon & Schuster promoted the book to journalists as an