In his first appearance at the 92nd Street Y, distinguished man of letters David Wells said he uses the gullibility of the American public as a means of publicizing his heralded works of fiction.

"I consider my work a metaphor for global instability," Wells said. "By intentionally drawing the ire of my employer and co-workers, I have been able to use the media to spread the deeper messages contained in my novels."

	David Wells rejoyces after delivering his thesis on the man-child in contemporary athletics.

Wells spoke as part of Granta's "Writers on the Edge" series sponsored jointly by Popov Vodka and GlensGreenieShack.com. He said purposely including and then retracting inflammatory lies while simultaneously presenting them as fact may confuse the majority of the public, but the tool allows those who would never pick up one of his works to become familiar with them.

"It's a deconstructionist thing," he told a crowd of roughly 3,000. "I have found that packaging my books as fact and then gradually revealing their status as figments of my imagination, I can make people believe I was half-drunk on the mound when I was really feeling only the slightly light-headed feeling one gets when mixing Benadryl with Bazooka."

There are other things, Wells said, that were kind of true but really not all the way true. "It's up to the reader," he says. "Words are whatever you make them. The writer has limits. As a reader, I have one request: Use your mind. Do your job."

Wells acknowledged that his unconventional approach to literature has earned him his fair share of critics.

"Anyone with the guts to threaten the accepted paradigm is bound to be met with the slings and arrows of the close-minded," Wells said. "To those people, I offer this parting shot: As Jack Nicholson was alleged to have said off-camera, 'You can't handle the half-truth.'"

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