Yale Templeton, an undistinguished professor of History at a university in Toronto, has made a shocking discovery: Abraham Lincoln was not, in fact, assassinated, but faked his own death so that he could assume a new identity and move to Canada. And the reason for Lincoln's ruse? Even more shocking. When the news breaks, the sitting President enlists his chief security officers to find the incriminating evidence and silence Templeton. Lincoln's Briefs is both a burlesque of university life and a satiric unravelling of Canadian - and American - national identity. It is also, in its own madcap way, a manifesto for the right of all people to lay claim to their true selves.

Michael Wayne is a professor of history, emeritus at the University of Toronto. He is the prize winning author of three books of American history: Death of an Overseer, The Reshaping of Plantation Society, and Imagining Black America. In Lincoln’s Briefs, his first novel, he gives himself free rein to explore the satiric side of historical possibilities. He comes by his affinity for parody honestly, or perhaps genetically. His father is the late Johnny Wayne of the iconic comedy team Wayne and Shuster.

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Lincoln's Briefs wraps brilliant satire inside a veil of improbable tales and even more improbable characters. A meditation, at once scathing and side-splitting, on what it means to be Canadian (and American too), this hilarious send-up also proclaims the right of all individuals to imagine themselves in whatever way they choose. Wayne's exposé of our national illusions is merciless, his celebration of the possibilities of human imagination, liberating. — Paul Gross, Actor and Filmmaker