TWO much touted books exposed as fakes in recent weeks — a searing U.S. memoir on life with gangs and drugs and a best-seller-turned-movie on the Holocaust — have rocked the publishing world. But they are only the latest in an ignominious literary tradition of bogus tales and trumped-up protagonists.

The most recent was revealed Tuesday by The New York Times about a newly published work the paper itself had not only praised but whose author it had also profiled in a special article.

“Love and Consequences,” a memoir about life as a half-white, half-native American girl growing up in a foster home on the rough side of South Central Los Angeles, was a complete fabrication, it said.

Its author, named as Margaret Jones, turned out to be a pseudonym for a white woman, Margaret Seltzer, 33, who grew up in a well-off section of the California city with her biological parents and a childhood far removed from the drug-running and gang violence recounted in the memoir.

Among the wrenching anecdotes in the book was one that “Jones” had been given her first gun as a birthday present at age 14.

Its publisher, Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group, quickly gave notice on its Web site that the book was no longer for sale and offered a full refund, upon request, to those who had purchased the work.

The scandal broke as the media, notably in France and Belgium, was still buzzing about another amazing autobiography, “Born with Wolves,” about a young Jewish girl whose parents were deported from Brussels by the Nazis during World War II. She then crossed Europe with a wolf pack that supposedly adopted her.

After soaring to best-seller status and morphing into a movie, a Belgian daily exposed the denouement late last month: the tale was fabricated by its 70-year-old author Minique de Wael, who lives in the United States.

(SD-Agencies)