Whodunit? No, Whowroteit

In a rather interesting marketing ploy, Random House has just published a collection entitled The Secret Society of Demolition Writers, with short stories by Aimee Bender, Alice Sebold, Lauren Slater, Benjamin Cheever and Elizabeth McCracken, among others. The interesting part is, the stories are anonymous: the reader has no way of ascertaining which story's written by which author -- unless he chooses to guess, based on their earlier style.

It's been called "the publishing equivalent of a whodunit" and, as this report states, "the results don’t reach new extremes in either narrative form or content, but there’s an icy streak through the tales and their often deeply screwed-up characters that’s refreshing in a summer read...It’s a solid collection in general; the ready-made game of who’s who with the who’s who of contributors is just a bonus for book geeks."