Would you buy a used memoir from this man?

Will Dewees is a big fat liar.

He makes stuff up and pretends it's true. He fabricates and confabulates. He never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. In short, Dewees is a writer of something that's rather like fiction – and of course, nothing at all like journalism.

To be more specific, the Athens resident, and former Ohio University linguistics professor, is a creator of what he calls "flash fiction" – short, quirky, quick-hit tales and musings that typically run only about a page or three. Following hard on the heels of his last quasi-counterfeit memoir, "The Great Amesville, Ohio Flood of 1998," he has now released a new book, "Memoir of a Liar (and Cookbook)."

The book contains not only some 50 examples of Dewees' "flash fiction," but also – all over the front and back covers – the hand-scribbled notes to himself that were the original basis for each of the stories.

"Memoir" claims to be a cookbook as well; this appears to be just another of Dewees's many lies, though one story does contain what might be charitably described as a cornbread recipe, and the book also includes a very edifying chapter on the discovery and naming of such famous vegetables as Brussels sprouts, Hubbard squash and asparagus.

"This is the third volume in a series of lies and flash fictions," Dewees explained Saturday. "It's short – everything is under 1,100 to 1,200 words."

As its title suggests, the book presents itself as a "memoir," but if you believe that everything it contains is historically accurate, the writer undoubtedly has some beachfront property in Arizona he would like to sell you. (Dewees even includes some patently manufactured jacket blurbs touting his book, and culled from such well-known publications as the Athens Argus).

Just to let his readers know the kind of unflinching honesty they're in for, the first story starts out, "Both my parents were dead long before I was born on June 31, 1999."

In a prologue, Dewees explains that he set out with the best of intentions to bare his soul and tell the true stories of his most guilty moments – the time he changed the label on a shirt to save money at a store, for example. He soon concluded, however, that honesty was not the most fecund literary policy.

"I was going to get serious. I was going to get confessional," he recalled. "But (those stories) were so boring."

Some of the tales, to be sure, do sound as though they actually happened to Dewees – or are at least, as they say in Hollywood, "based on a true story." There are accounts of his time in Africa and China, for example, and a story of how he and his boyhood buddies once accidentally maimed a dog with a firecracker in a milk bottle. There is a powerful account of his father's lingering death. There are some fairly straight-ahead rants on war and peace and politics.

On the other hand, there's the story about how broccoli got its name (from a famous Italian tenor), or the one about the guy who went into a fast-food restaurant, insisted on being served a burger that looked exactly like the gorgeous one pictured on the menu, and was savagely beaten by the other customers in line.

Though Dewees stressed that he doesn't want to be constantly "winking" at the reader as he writes, he admitted that after his last book – which also misrepresented itself as a factual memoir – he's gotten a little more careful about telegraphing the fictional nature of what he's doing.

"The last one, a couple of people (I know) got pretty upset, because I killed them in the story," he recalled. "I didn't make it real clear that it was lies last time."

Part of the fun, he suggested, is stringing people along, with stories that get "more and more ridiculous," until the moment when the reader suddenly gets the epiphany that his or her leg is, just possibly, being pulled. "These are kind of, 'when did you stop believing?' stories," Dewees explained.

Dewees will be "launching" the book at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Athens Public Library.