Rakoff’s written voice is at worst curmudgeonly with a holier than thou demeanor toward his subjects. At best he’s sardonically gossipy and somehow not very engaging. The cleverest part of his writing is his vocabulary. So he gets points for owning a thesaurus, but it’s as if he’s simply flaunting his intellect the way he mocks subjects such as the men who’ve hiked the same mountain every day for x number of years. Voices like this are a dime a dozen nowadays. It’s a personal preference of mine to enjoy my personal essayists with more open mindedness and empathy. What are we here for if not to find the humanity in something unfamiliar? I suppose I can’t begrudge the late writer for choosing to present the character he was going for on the page, as long as no one begrudges me for not remembering much of this collection by next week.

Meh. Got it hoping it would be Sedaris-y, and while the guy is obviously very smart and a good writer, this is what got me from really liking the thing: Okay, so his shtick is that he's a gay angsty New Yorker who's terribly lonely and sad and a perennial outsider, possibly because he's too much of a clever smartass to bear. HOWEVER! When you finally finish the collection you find that he has like, 200 people who he thanks in his acknowledgment section, which COMPLETELY negates the persona he's tried to develop in the essays, and casts this liars pall over the whole work. [ETA: Oh fine I get that the book is called Fraud, so that could be deliberate, but I'm not sure that unreliable narrators and personal essays are a super great mix. Unless your name is Frey.]

Pick it up in the bookstore and read the essay on the outdoors-man school, it's probably the best one there. Also flip through and check out the wood block prints (??? that's a guess) that open each chapter. They're quite nice.

Hilarious and it made me fall in love with the author. I have watched countless interviews with Rakoff and I found a new favorite. He said he was inspired by Sedaris, but I think Rakoff's wit and situational comedy is insurmountable.

There are some very good essays in this volume, but there's also a lot of whining. Rakoff hates Robin Williams, the film "Life is Beautiful" and its Oscar-winning star and writer Roberto Benigni, being outdoors, being indoors, being with people, being alone... you get the picture. His rants about Williams and Benigni in particular are just self-important drivel. I'm reminded of restaurant critic Anton Ego in Pixar's "Ratatouille," who says "We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

There's also a basic formula to these essay collections by reporters, which Sarah Vowell's "Take the Cannoli" also follows to a point* (though her prose is infinitely better than Rakoff's): reporter as fish out of water in weird situation that no "normal" person would ever subject themselves to, I mean, just LOOK at all these losers and agree that I, the reporter, am superior in my disdain, and I'm only here because my publication is making me write this (and paying all my expenses), but maybe there's a smidgen of something worthwhile that I might throw in at the end. For Rakoff, add a comment about his plastic Payless boots (featured in two of these pieces) to make the point that no one is really serious about being outside, right?

But there are a few gems. In particular, the piece about working as an assistant resonated with me - been there, painfully! And I enjoyed the piece about returning to Japan, older and wiser, after the burst of the economic "bubble."

*A weird thing I noticed about Rakoff's mention of "my friend Sarah" who took him to an amusement park - in her book, Vowell at least mentioned Rakoff's whole name and some of his insights into their experience together, but in this book, Rakoff threw her in there for the heck of it, not because it added to the story he was telling. Hardly reciprocal, so why did he bother?

Borrowed from MM during isolation.

One of my all-time favourite short films is The New Tenants, in which David Rakoff has a supremely world-weary role. Fraud is a collection of essays - quite diverting and enjoyable for me because I can hear his distinctive voice. A light read but with some laugh-out-loud moments and occasional flirtations with profundity.

I purchased this book after hearing the author, David Rakoff, interviewed on NPR. He was witty, funny, and I couldn't wait to start reading.

I was profoundly disappointed.

Despite being a brilliant writer, I found this collection of essays to be one hateful diatribe after another. He states "I have yet to meet anyone outside of the press room, however, who does not actively revile Robin Williams," referring to him as "the Billy Joel of comedy, accessibly catchy in the initial moment, but with the shelf life of yogurt." Hmm, I wonder how many people have ever heard of David Rakoff? I'd be willing to bet the majority of people have heard of Billy Joel and Robin Williams.

Quote: "It's just so great to be able to be made to laugh again," says a woman outside the theater, her hand against her chest. Her voice is suffused with the relief of a patient whose fever has just broken or whose boil has been lanced. I roll my eyes in "get her" disgust at an acquaintance.

Quote (referring to Roberto Benigni and his film "Life Is Beautiful"): "Even his buffoonish appearance at the Academy Awards, where he didn't even have the decency to throw a bone to the millions who died in order to give him such great material by calling for that shameless yet requisite moment of silence: a vile, vile, morally reprehensible, shitty film!"

These excerpts are from an essay titled "The Best Medicine," and subsequent offerings dish up more of the same.

I'd say the best medicine is to stay away from this book. I came away feeling anxious, upset, and cheated. Satire is one thing; contempt quite another.

After reading Mr. Rakoff's first essay I wondered if I really wanted to read another, but fortunately I did. Although I disliked the first essay, each of the following essays got better and better. A Canadian transplant who calls New York City home, he is a journalist, Jewish, gay, and possesses an amazing vocabulary. He has reported on some of the most unexpected and interesting topics. Honest, refreshing and original, I recommend this book highly (except for the first essay).

I pity David Rakoff. It must be tough to go through life as a witty and urbane gay writer of amusingly embellished autobiographical essays frequently featured on This American Life named David, unless you are the other one. I'm not even going to say the other one's name, because I'm sure 90% of the reviews on here already mention it, and I want to stand out from the crowd.

(Hint: it ryhmes with "Ted, wear this.")

Yes, it's very well written and quite funny, but it's not fall-off-your-chair-laughing-until-it-hurts-and-then crawl-back-up-and-read-the-same-passage-again-to-see-if-it-will-still-have-the-same-impact-and-it-does funny. It's just a chuckle-lightly-to-yourself funny, occasionally peppered with an observation that might be mildly interesting, but could not be described as "thought-provoking" unless your thoughts are Irish and drunk.

When my niece was a baby, I looked a little bit like her daddy. At the time, we both sported bushy red beards and wore glasses. I recall an incident where she saw me and after a moment of joy, her face transformed into a gape of horror, followed by a wellspring of tears and screams. Because I looked enough like her daddy for her to briefly mistake me for him, but then she was crushed with disappointment at discovering an avuncular counterfeit.

I expect Rakoff suffers a similar reaction from readers. His writing and persona are enough like something very familiar and beloved by many that its failure to duplicate cannot be forgiven. I'm sorry to say he will never ever escape the comparison and will never be judged fairly. My pity can only go so far. I can't imagine he'd be nearly as successful as he has been were it not for the association, and the other David has a blurb, right there on the cover, which should make it clear that he'd rather be rich than judged on his own merits. He may be a fraud, but he's not a fool.

Obnoxious. I went into this expecting some sharp-tongued humor, but what I got essays by a deeply unpleasant name dropper. Rakoff made himself seem like exactly the kind of person I don't want to spend any time with, which is why I quit reading the book. It was fucking with my blood pressure.

It's unfortunate that my first impulse, one common to many readers, is to compare David Rakoff to David Sedaris. Because compared to Sedaris's winning alchemy of wit and absurdity, Rakoff's stories at first seem a little wan. To the hearty comedy that is "Me Talk Pretty One Day," "Fraud" might be a bitter, hemophiliac sibling. But I think I might prefer Rakoff for exactly this reason. Rakoff is less interested in mining a situation for its inherent inanity than he is in investigating his own cynical reactions to those situations. Where Sedaris is brightly, eagerly funny, and forthrightly sets out to endear himself to his readers, Rakoff is caustic and dark. His jokes don't have punchlines, except where, through a combination of pomposity and self-flagellation, he is himself the punchline.

One of many gems: "The average fertile thirty-five-year-old man has many million sperm, a few million of which are motile enough to knock someone up. When I get my results, I find that I have ten. Not ten million: ten. Three are dead in the water, and the other seven are technically motile but given a grade very close to dead... I come up with the idea of naming them. For all the male-of-the-species reproductive good they'll do me, I consider calling them all Janet. Then I settle on Radcliffe, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Vassar."

Not to be too distracted by the comparison between Sedaris and Rakoff, I do think it's worth noting that Rakoff's essays have a fuller roundness. Whereas Sedaris's stories ramble a little like an anecdote delivered to a friend, Rakoff's stories are tighter, each finding by the conclusion the thematic thread of its introduction. Of course, there's much more to them as well. There is greater loneliness in these essays. Epiphanic moments illuminate the most alienating situations. One such moment comes as the author returns from a lonesome trip to Scotland over Passover: "I retire to the dining car. I sit, smoking and drinking a stunningly expensive beer across from a man who tucks in to his plate of haggis and peas. I smile at him in greeting. He does not know it, but this is our silent seder for two."

Fraud wins the prize for having the most diversified series of events compiled into one short story collection. From searching for Hidden People in Iceland to hunting for old sperm in a Toronto sperm bank to pretending to be Sigmund Freud in a Manhattan department store window, each story is a concise and witty account of something you’ll never experience yourself. But Rakoff’s writing is high-browed, and the humor often times gets lost in the highly specific musings of someone-who’s-lived-in-Manhattan-for-too-long-and-therefore-has-cynical(if not elitist)-commentary-on-everything.

All of the essays in this collection have merit, and the one that closes the book is...well, if a better essay has ever been written, I'd very much like to read it. This one tells the story of his 'dilettante' bout with cancer which, sadly, came back and killed him a couple of years ago. The story he tells of those years filled me with a deep, multilevel sadness, but also included a couple of genuine belly laughs. This is not an easy thing for a writer to do.

Two other essays that evoked similar reactions that I've read lately include Sloane Crosley's "The Back of a Truck" and Shelley Puhak's "Eva, She Kill Her One Daughter."

I am in awe of all of these writers. I am a devotee of master essayist John McPhee, but even he cannot quite break through the emotional barrier that these three authors have managed.