6/12/2008 11:57:00 AM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Over at Omnivoracious, hosted by Amazon.com. Only one post is up so far and it's annoyingly music-centric. Why all the flashing lights and filler for your readings, James Frey? Why can't you just get up there and, um, READ? We have grown grumpy and tired of you, sir. We don't care what you think of Ozzfest, we would rather hear some things about your forthcoming book and your deal with HarperCollins and maybe, erhm, advice for writers who fucked up and are still trucking along and biding their time and doing their thing, maybe? Please show us what you're actually made of or go away.

James Frey will read from his new novel Bright Shiny Morning on May 28th at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Tickets are $5 and they're not sold out yet. Head to the Brookline Booksmith for more info.

5/5/2008 11:36:39 AM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

How stoked was Richard Johnson when he and the rest of the Page Six crew got to slap the headline "Mailer's Lust Goes to Harvard" on today's Post? We're still getting over the ick-factor, but the item is pretty interesting, if you like reading about the fact that even Pulitzer-Prize winning authors dare their mistresses to write 50-page sex scenes. Don't believe what you hear in creative writing workshops, because if Carole Mallory can do it, surely, you can, too.

4/23/2008 4:03:22 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Daniel Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million) wrote what we thought was a depressing but super-smart Op-Ed piece in the Sunday Times. He makes excellent points about the fake-memoir trend, but even more important, he explains what it means to the opressed classes of individuals whose identities are being stolen in the process. Much has already been written about how race and oppressed minorities play into these book scandals (most recently, Jews and African-Americans). Mendelsohn brings that in, and makes a key connection to our culture's reality-worship. The observations he makes about our obsession with the fantasy, and the satisfaction of experiencing a "redemeptive" situation -- regardless of its validity -- are particularly chilling. An excerpt from the last part of the essay (read the whole thing if you have the time, though!):

In an era obsessed with “identity,” it’s useful to remember that identity is precisely that quality in a person, or group, that cannot be appropriated by others; in a world in which theme-park-like simulacra of other places and experiences are increasingly available to anyone with the price of a ticket, the line dividing the authentic from the ersatz needs to be stressed, rather than blurred. As, indeed, Ms. De Wael has so clearly blurred it, for reasons that she has suggested were pitiably psychological. “The story is mine,” she announced. “It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.”...

“My reality” raises even more far-reaching and dire questions about the state of our culture, one in which the very concept of “reality” seems to be in danger. Think of “reality” entertainments, which so unnervingly parallel the faux-memoirists’ appropriation of others’ authentic emotional experience: in them, real people are forced to endure painful or humiliating or extreme situations, their real emotional reactions becoming the source of the viewers’ idle gratification. Think of the Internet: an unimaginably powerful tool for education but also a Wild West of random self-expression in which anyone can say anything about anything (or anyone) and have it “published,” and which has already made problematic the line between truth and falsehood, expert and amateur opinion, authentic and inauthentic identities, reality and fantasy.

That pervasive blurriness, the casualness about reality that results when you can turn off entire worlds simply by unsubscribing, changing a screen name, or closing your laptop, is what ups the cultural ante just now. It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before; what’s worrisome is that, maybe for the first time, the question people are raising isn’t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it’s true. Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the feeling on the part of many readers that, true or false, his book had given them the feel-good, “redemptive” experience they’d hoped for when they bought his novel — er, memoir.

3/10/2008 11:04:13 AM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Everyone is all in a huff over the "Margaret Jones" scandal. Her True Life story, Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, was a fraud. She is not part Native American. She was not an abused foster child living on the streets of L.A., or a member of the gang the Bloods. She grew up with her biological parents in Sherman Oaks, CA, and went to a private Episcopal high school. While she did work with inner city kids, she interviewed a lot of them in L.A. coffee shops and pawned composites of their stories off as her own. Margaret Jones isn't even her real name. It's Margaret "Peggy" Seltzer.

So anyway, the main things that seem to be erupting from what has been deemd the Worst Week Ever in Publishing are:
1. Memoirs sell better than fiction (just like reality TV gets networks better advertising and bigger ratings). This, apparently, is something writers have caught on to. So they turn "novels" into "memoirs." Even if they aren't exactly true.
2. Publishers don't do deeper fact-checking because it could ruin the author-editor relationship.
3. Love and Consequences wouldn't have gotten the reception it did in the first place if it wasn't for the Charles McGrath connection.
4. Er, James Frey is still publishing a new book.

Frowny faces all around.

We think it would be nice if fiction wasn't so hard to sell anymore, if every woman writing about their coming-of-age experiences wasn't immediately categorized as chick-lit and designed a book cover featuring pink sparkly heels and a Cosmo, if publicists could somehow, magically, control positive hype before it resulted in hundreds of bloggers hating on talented writers, if writers could be championed without having to be Diablo Cody for it to happen, and if classic books we love weren't repackaged with stupid cartoons that look nothing like real characters just to appeal to new audiences, because it really undermines the intelligence of buyers!

These are just a few of our complaints. Margaret, we are sure, will be feeling the heat for quite some time.

3/5/2008 12:10:30 PM by Sharon | Comments [2] |  

Kelefa Sanneh, our favorite New York Times pop music critic, is going to be a staff writer at The New Yorker! Now he and the S.F.J. can totally duke it out over the Lil' Mama and Britney coverage. Loving it! Also moving to 4 Times Square is New York magazine writer Ariel Levy, of whose work we are also big fans.

Margaret B. Jones's (not her real name!) Love and Consequences, a memoir about coming-of-age as a penniless, abused foster child in the L.A. gang the Bloods was -- wait for it -- a big, fat lie. Girl got Michiko Kakutani creaming over her writing last week, and she's a stone-faced bullshit artist. Oh, the many ways in which she could have handled this differently. Peggy, did you ever think about writing a non-fiction book based on your friends' accounts, instead of, we don't know, passing them off as your own?!

Remember when we freaked out over that Sloane Crosley profile in the NY Observer? The Most Popular Publicist in the World is back, and her new book is about to come out. The hype machine is nearly short-circuiting itself over her tome? You don't say! We're still really, really excited to read it, though. This is the first personal essay Sloane published, in the Village Voice, and it's very funny and good, so we guess the blurbers are all right. We like her. We can't help it. Please let her survive this ugly process of the build-up and the backlash.

3/4/2008 11:02:07 AM by Sharon | Comments [2] |  

The New York Daily News reports today that the authors of the new Anna Nicole Smith book are suing their own publisher.

Jody (Babydol) Gibson, a former Hollywood "super madam," is selling "Anna Nicole Smith: Portrait of an Icon" online through her imprint, Corona. But authors Pol' Atteu and Patrik Simpson tell me they backed out of their arrangement with Gibson and are selling a separate "signature edition" through publisher Kings Road.

We can't believe we had to look up what a "super madam" was. We are appropriately humbled. We also think Anna looks absolutely, unequivocably, utterly gorgeous in the above photo. The rest? Typical.

2/12/2008 3:05:18 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

James Frey is serious about his come-back, so much so that he's jazzing up his forthcoming novel, Bright Shiny Morning, with jacket art by his friend Richard Prince. He's also thinking of going Ira Glass on us, with a book tour that the New York Post's Page Six likens to something that sounds more like a concert tour:

"We're talking about having bands, other authors reading their work. We may try to include some pyrotechnics," he said with a laugh."

Elsewhere, New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner David Car Johnston is pissed about how the Sunday Book Review handled his tome, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves At Government Expense (And Stick You With The Bill). Complaints as noted by Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp are here, the review in question itself, by Jonathan Chait, is here.

Recession arriving in T-minus now? Magazines, in trouble? Why, you don't say. Of course, it's fashion week, when even retail miracles seem possible. Unfortunately, the publishing industry doesn't have an equivalent. Unless you count BEA?

2/4/2008 2:41:03 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Publisher Nan A. Talese publicly blasted Oprah over the James Frey controversy this Saturday, at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest:

"I'm afraid I'm unapologetic of the whole thing," she said. "And the only person who should be apologetic is Oprah Winfrey," who she says exhibited "fiercely bad manners — you don't stone someone in public, which is just what she did."

Calling Winfrey's behavior "mean and self-serving," Talese said that readers should be able to decide for themselves about whether to believe an author, and that Frey was clear about how believable he was.

"When someone starts out and says, 'I have been an alcoholic. I have lied, I have cheated' … you do not think this is going to be the New Testament."

"Fiercely bad manners" is polite publisher code for raving, career-destroying harpy bitch, in case you were wondering. Have fun trying to get another title in Oprah's Book Club, Nanners! You're so done. And you fucking rule.

 

7/30/2007 1:45:36 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |