Writers who mystify operate through paradox. Since the eighteenth century, when the term was coined in French, the cycle of temporarily taking in a reader by means of a deceptive text, then deliberately uncovering the fake, has enacted a drama of Enlightenment. Obfuscation reveals trickery, in an exercise that simultaneously embodies the ideals of Enlightenment and interrogates their limits. In Learning from Lying the lens of mystification...