As the debate about whether to publish on the Internet continues to rage in publishing houses and ivory towers across North America, Oprah’s latest stunt is adding fuel to the fire.

Last week, author Suze Orman made her book Women and Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny available free on Oprah’s website for a period of 33 hours. More than 1.1 million copies were downloaded. Even so, the book remains a bestseller and ranks No. 6 on Amazon.com.

Cormac McCarthy is that rare thing in American letters: a writer who manages to balance literary acclaim with a large popular readership. (All of his books since 1992’s All the Pretty Horses, for which he won the National Book Award, have been bestsellers.) He’s also still consistently described as a recluse, despite a recent Oprah appearance and open collaboration with Hollywood. In a conversation with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, whose adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, he lets slip his admiration of director Terrence Mallick, his distaste for magic realism, and his unlikely friendship with Richard Gere. Here’s McCarthy on appreciating the Bard:

Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I’d seen movies of Hamlet, I’d seen kind of amateurish productions, and I’d read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, “Holy s—.”

Holy s—, indeed.

The New York Times is reporting that Jessica Seinfeld, the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has been having to field accusations of plagiarism relating to her new cookbook, Deceptively Delicious, a guide for parents of picky eaters.

[…] a number of readers posting on Amazon.com and Oprah.com and other Web sites have pointed out some similarities between Ms. Seinfeld’s book, which was published this month by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, and another cookbook published by Running Press, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group, in April.

That book, The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine, who is not a celebrity, also suggests that parents purée healthy foods like spinach and sweet potatoes and hide them in childhood favorites like macaroni and cheese or brownies.

Those sorts of similarities, the article suggests, are about as damning as it gets, which isn’t all that damning, if you ask us. Haven’t parents been using those techniques for centuries? And though Missy Chase Lapine is described as “not a celebrity,” she is the former publisher of Eating Well magazine, which means she’s not exactly a starving nobody.

The weird part of all this, however, is that no one involved is officially accusing Ms. Seinfeld.

“Honestly I can’t speculate, and I’m not going to accuse anyone of anything,” Ms. Lapine said. “I suppose it’s possible it’s a coincidence.”

Nevertheless, the speculation was enough to get Mr. Seinfeld himself on the phone with the Times reporter:

“Let’s be realistic — my wife isn’t in this for the money or the publicity.” He added, “I really don’t think we have another Watergate here.”

If you’re like us, you’re probably getting real sick of hearing about O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional If I Did It, but attention must be paid when the queen herself, Oprah, thrusts it back into the limelight. Yesterday, she invited the Goldman family onto her show to discuss the book and their decision to publish it, a choice for which they have been criticized. According to MSNBC, which has posted a good summation of the show’s highlights, Oprah said it was a “moral, ethical dilemma” for her to give more publicity to the book:

Winfrey acknowledged that her program often promotes books and authors, yet, she said, “I don’t want to be in the position to promote this book, because I, too, think it’s despicable.”

The MSNBC piece ends by stating that, as of yesterday, If I Did It was No. 8 in sales at Barnes and Noble and No. 52 on Amazon.com. According to a more recently updated piece on The Book Standard website, however, the book has subsequently shot up to No. 1 at Barnes and Noble and No. 2 on Amazon.com. Way to go Oprah…

Just when the dust seemed to have settled on the whole A Million Little Pieces kerfuffle, here comes the book’s editor, Nan Talese, to say that not only would she do everything exactly the same had she the chance to go back in time, but that it’s neither she nor James Frey who “should be apologetic,” but Oprah herself.

Talese offers the simplest, and the most audacious and bizarre, defense of Frey’s mendacity yet:

“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.”

In the spirit of Talese’s logic, Quillblog would now like to preempt all future accusations of libel, sloppy reporting, outright fabrication, and offensiveness by stating, for the record, that, hey, we’re only human. You’ve been warned.

Hear ye, hear ye, Oprah’s Book Club has spoken: your new favourite book is going to be Middlesex, the sprawling 2002 book by Jeffrey Eugenides that is (only at base) about a hermaphrodite who chooses to switch genders. Oprah is also billing it as being about family secrets, identities, and self-discovery – her favourites!

The Book Club website promises downloadable goodies such as an “exclusive bookmark,” questions for the author, and, oh yeah, some of the book’s content. Plus you – yes, you – can win a contest to be the first to e-mail Eugenides.

Oprah has just announced the latest selection for her book club, and it’s kinda weird: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Even at the best of times, McCarthy’s prose is rather lacking in daily-affirmation material, but The Road is especially dark. Here’s how author Denis Lehane describes the book in his Amazon.com review:

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is.

Now here’s how Oprah describes it on her website:

Start reading Oprah’s newest book club selection! It’s the father-son journey you’ll never forget.

Isn’t this a little like describing The Shining as a sweet family comedy?

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez not only stirred things up this week with his address to the U.N., in which he referred to President George W. Bush as the devil, he also started an incorrect rumour that renowned linguist and political thinker Noam Chomsky was dead. At a news conference, Chávez expressed regret at “not having met that icon of the American left, the linguist Noam Chomsky, before his death.”

The New York Times checked in on Chomsky and found him alive and well, working and writing. The scholar was, however, struggling to get through 10,000 emails he had received regarding Chávez’s remark.

Chomsky said he was not offended by Chávez’s error. In fact, The Times reported that “while addressing world leaders at the United Nations, [Chávez] flagged Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, which Mr. Chomsky published in 2003, as a must-read.” It propelled the book into Amazon’s top 10 bestsellers.

Is Chávez the new Oprah?

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The New York Times

In case anyone missed it, James Frey has spoken in-depth to a reporter – Laura Barton, writing for The Guardian – for the first time since the massive controversy over his Oprah-anointed but exaggerated “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces. The interview makes for a longish and frustrating and not very rewarding piece, so we’ll save you some time by highlighting the most salient points.

1. All that media attention sure has made for a rough few months.

2. People on the street understand, though. “Most people just say they loved the books, or it helped them, or someone they knew.”

3. Doubleday surely must have known from the start that Pieces was a “manipulated manuscript.”

4. Frey was a cultural scapegoat. “People feel frustrated by a lot of distortions by politicians, by members of the media, by movie stars, by tabloid journalists, and it was like a sorta confluence of events that I happened to be in the middle of.”

5. The Smoking Gun, the website that broke the news of the book’s falsehoods, was just doing its job – but really, it’s kind of a sleazy job, innit? “Their job is to get people to come to their website, to look at what they do. I just never thought that I was that big a target.”

6. He did have an anesthesia-free root canal – or at least, that’s what’s “true to my memory.”

7. North Americans can’t grasp the nuances of the dance between fiction and non- because they’re simply unsophisticated. “I think it has in certain ways to do with being a young culture, with being a culture that has less of an artistic and literary canon than some of the older European cultures.”

8. The publishers and agents who disowned Frey during the controversy are still making lots of money from his work.

Actually, he may have a point with that last one.

A couple of points that are intriguingly not explored in the article are: (a) How has Frey spent the money he’s made? Has he given any of it away? And (b) If the book was always meant to be a kind of postmodern freeplay of fact and fiction, why did he repeatedly insist that every word was true until it was proven otherwise?

Anyway, lest we think that the Frey fiasco has soured the market on confessional memoirs, writer Choire Sicha sets us straight with a feature in The New York Observer. And the story looks at the interesting question of where the policies of Alcoholics Anonymous — to which many such memoirists belong — fit in. “Members of A.A. have been struggling with the significance of that second ‘A’ for more than half a century. Within the group, members openly discuss their alcoholism; outside the group, they refrain from discussing their membership. That’s the theory.”

Related links:
Click here for the James Frey interview
Click here for the New York Observer feature

With the film adpatation of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation set for release this fall, and Chew on This, an adaptation of the book aimed at kids, new in stores, the American food industry is stepping up its attempts to discredit Schlosser. The Center for Media and Democracy surveys the ways various “industry-funded front groups” have been trying to drown out Schlosser’s message. And writer John Stauber also reminds readers about Oprah Winfrey’s long legal fight with the beef industry, which was precipitated by an Oprah show on which guest Howard Lyman had the temerity to point out that feeding cows to cows might be a bad idea.

Related links:
Click here for John Stauber’s posting

In Other Media has done a good job of not posting about James Frey in recent weeks, but this one was too good to pass up. Author Peter Carey, who has a well-documented interest in literary hoaxes and a new novel coming out, weighed in on the whole mess in a recent interview in The Bookseller that Gawker linked to on Friday. Says Carey: “It’s trite to say it, but the U.S. is a country run by liars going to war on a fantasy, so it’s interesting to see people getting self-righteous about James Frey. And by the way, if you’re going to publish a memoir by an addict in rehab, everyone knows that one of the corollaries of addiction is lying. So I don’t see why everyone gets into such a fucking uproar because an addict is a liar! Oprah acted like a total bully: talk about about crushing a butterfly on a wheel — or a cockroach on a wheel — because that’s what she did on television to this little creep.”

Related links:
Click here for the Gawker item
Click here for the Carey interview in The Bookseller

A recently posted piece on TheBookseller.com rekindles an old and widely held contention regarding the effectiveness of reviews in selling books. Granted, the piece has its flaws: it is scattershot and far too brief to cover the scope it attempts, and its writer, Damian Horner, works in marketing and promotions, not in the publishing industry, and thus appears somewhat unacquainted with the quirks and unique challenges of the book biz. Yet Horner does make some interesting, if underdeveloped, points. His main charge is that hyperbolic review quotes appear on so many book covers that these quotes cease to mean much to potential readers. He also criticizes a so-called overabundance of reviews in the press, while vaunting the Internet’s role in providing more balanced coverage. According to Horner, readers’ distrust of the conventional gushing review has contributed to the growing importance of book clubs, word of mouth, and popular TV book coverage – such as on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on the U.K.’s Richard and Judy Book Club – on book sales. This trend, says Horton, is something publishers should cash in on. “I suspect we will soon see publishers working much more closely with bloggers and reading groups,” he says.

Related links:
Click here for Horner’s piece on TheBookseller.com

One of the more perplexing things about the James Frey crucifixion on Oprah last week was publisher Nan Talese’s somewhat patrician attitude to Oprah’s anger at Doubleday’s failure to check any of the facts in Frey’s pseudo-memoir. Talese generally avoided Oprah’s most probing questions and said that up until she read the report on The Smoking Gun she believed in the absolute veracity of the book, including Frey’s contention that he had two root canals done without novocaine. Though Doubleday has since issued an apology over the incident, Talese remains unmoved by the whole affair, if an article in The Wall Street Journal is any indication. According to the article, Talese received a standing ovation from her underlings upon returning to her midtown Manhattan office and has since received more than 500 e-mails, the “overwhelming majority [of which] have been supportive,” she says, withoug specifying what exactly the respondents are in support of. The article also examines the supposed grey area between legal vetting and fact checking, and examines the possible repercussions on the non-fiction book market. (Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Read the article in The Wall Street Journal

See what happens when popular TV shows feature authors as guests – everybody’s talking about it. James Frey’s smackdown at the hands of Oprah Winfrey Thursday has been parsed a million times already, but here’s one more from Salon. However, Hillary Frey (no relation) thinks that Winfrey took it a bit too far. “As the audience clapped when Oprah spit out a real zinger (”It’s a lie!”; “I think you presented a false person”), it was hard to avoid thinking that Frey was being put on display not to set the record straight, but for a public flogging,” Frey writes. “More than once Oprah emphasized that this experience has ‘embarrassed’ her. Her revenge: shaming another person in front of a live studio audience. Who knew that Oprah was an ‘eye for an eye’ kind of lady?”

The writer also pokes fun at the most absurd part of Thursday’s show: the other panellists and writers who appeared on the show either in person or via videotape. New York Times columnist Frank Rich used his face time to take the whole Frey/Oprah thing and – yes, it’s true! – connect it to corporate scandals and the Bush administration. (It’s nice to see Rich branching out and offering challenging, unique perspectives on the problems of our time.) Writes (H.) Frey: “Rich took it one leap further, decrying lying in all aspects of culture, including Enron, the sham of Jessica Simpson’s marriage to Nick Lachey and the war in Iraq (at which point Oprah’s eyes glazed over). This took what was decent, if depressing, theater to the level of farce.”

Related links:
Click here for the Salon story

The Beast, an indie newspaper from Buffalo, New York, that is a little more angry than most of its mealymouthed Canadian counterparts, has recently published a list of the 50 most loathsome people in America. A few writers or, at the very least, people who have published books (or read books) are on the list (which is a good enough excuse for this Friday afternoon glass of haterade).

Here are some of the high-ranking notables and the specific sentence handed down by the editors of The Beast to punish the loathsome:

#20 Oprah Winfrey: “Crushed by self-commissioned 40-story platinum Oprah statue.”

#10 Bill O’Reilly: “After O’Reilly’s influence fundamentally changes the nature of jurisprudence, he is tortured and jailed for life when it is discovered that he once leafed through a copy of the Communist Manifesto as a teen.”

#8 Judith Miller: “After a brief but horrible stint as a chemical weapons test subject for Monsanto, Miller is vivisected without anesthesia and her organs are harvested alive to be preserved as spares for Seymour Hersh.”

#7 Thomas Friedman: “Column outsourced to Bangalore, where there is some difficulty in finding a peasant ignorant and ineloquent enough to please his audience. Compelled at gunpoint to write a 500-page retraction of his recent best-seller, called No, Actually the World Is Round.”

And one more, just for kicks, #3 George W. Bush: “Trapped for eternity under shoddily manufactured Diebold voting machine, unable to reach nearby refrigerator full of hot dogs and bourbon.”

Related links:
Click here for the full list from The Beast

Well, now we know why James Frey cancelled his appearance in Toronto, which was scheduled for Thursday. We may have assumed he was simply going into low-profile mode, but it turns out something else came up: Oprah Winfrey had the fibbing author back onto her TV show on Thursday, and she wasn’t happy with him.

In the latest twist in the saga (a post-holiday gift that keeps on giving, at least for us publishing-media types), Oprah has reversed her original stance of supporting Frey and now says that he “betrayed millions of people.” When she brought him out in person, her main question was “Why did you lie?”

Frey’s original publisher, Doubleday’s Nan Talese, was also on hand. Was she repentant? Has she taken anything away from all this? Well, according to the Gawker recap, she took the opportunity to testify that she once underwent a root canal without novocaine, in support of one of the more preposterous unverified claims in Frey’s book, A Million Little Pieces.

The New York Times and Gawker have the first of what will undoubtedly be many, many post-mortems; the Gawker one is more complete, at least at this writing.

Related links:
Click here for the Gawker recap of Frey’s latest Oprah appearance
Click here for the NYT article

Given current levels of inspiration following last night’s election results, In Other Media sees fit to return, one last time, to the well-worn comfort of the James Frey fiasco. Remember when Frey appeared on Larry King Live, testifying to the essential truth of his so-called memoir, A Million Little Pieces? Remember one of Frey’s chief defences – that investigative website The Smoking Gun disputed only a small portion of the book? Remember how he claimed that the rest of the book, set in a Minnesota drug rehabilitation centre, was essentially true?

Well, apparently, there are things rehab counsellors can say about the stays of alleged patients in their centres that could make things worse for people like Frey. And apparently, most of those things were said by many counsellors to Edward Wyatt in an article appearing today in The New York Times.

Wyatt reports that more than three months before The Smoking Gun’s report, and even before Oprah Winfrey had Frey on her show, Debra Jay, a frequent guest on Oprah and a counsellor formerly affiliated with the Hazelden rehabilitation centre in Center City, Minnesota, where Frey was allegedly committed, told producers of the show that “his portrayal of his experience there grossly distorted reality.”

“His description of treatment at Hazelden is almost entirely false,” said Jay. “I’m coming forward because his descriptions of treatment are so damaging…. These are things that could not happen to anybody at Hazelden or at any reputable licensed treatment center.”

Jay and other former Hazelden counsellors claim that Frey’s book may have done more harm than good, insofar as addictions treatment is concerned. “I have had young people say to me that if they had a child who was having problems, they would never send them to treatment after reading that book,” says former Hazelden counsellor Carol Colleran, adding that according to her experiences at the Hazelden, “98 percent of that book is false.”

In response to these claims, Frey resorted to tried and true Defence No. 2: “I told James that I’ve been there, that I worked there and I’ve never seen any of those things happen at Hazelden,” said John H. Curtiss, who worked at Hazelden for more than 19 years. “In a million years those things would not happen at Hazelden. He said that was his recollection, but that he changed the names.”

Winfrey and her associates were, as usual, unavailable for comment.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

In Other Media is growing as weary of the James Frey fabrication story as you are, but we need to point you to a good piece by Tom Scocca in the latest edition of the New York Observer. Scocca’s opinion is summed up on the first line of the story: “First things first: James Frey is a liar.” And he continues in the second paragraph: “His best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is a fraud. It is a seamless mass of falsehoods, told deliberately, for the purpose of making money.”

Scocca saves some of his vitriol for Frey’s chief enabler, Oprah Winfrey. “Ms. Winfrey’s rebuke to the publishing industry was as false as Mr. Frey’s root-canal story,” he writes. “At that moment, on Larry King, she had the power to do something about the industry’s practices. She could have given Random House the same treatment she gave Hermès – calling out Mr. Frey as a fraud right there, denouncing the book as a lie and urging her viewer-readers to return it en masse, demanding refunds. She could have ordered the company to take the hundreds of thousands of extra dollars that Oprah’s Book Club had brought it and use the money to hire a raft of $25,000-a-year factcheckers to ensure that non-fiction books were sold on something more than the author’s say-so.”

Related links:
Click here for the New York Observer story

The controversy continues over allegations that James Frey invented/embellished chunks of his Oprah-sanctioned bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. The latest bit of news is that the next printing of Frey’s book will include a note from the author that will address this. As Hillel Italie of The Associated Press reports, however, it is unclear what Frey will write in his author’s note: “Doubleday spokeswoman Alison Rich declined to offer details about the note or to comment on why it was being added. She would not say if the note was an acknowledgment often found in memoirs but not in A Million Little Pieces that names and events had been altered.” In Other Media is sincerely hoping that the author’s note addresses beard-trimming techniques. (Was it just me or did his beard look a little mangy on Larry King Live?)

The story broke last Sunday on The Smoking Gun, so, just in time for the weekend newspapers, readers should be girding themselves for think pieces and other related fare, like this list on the CBC Arts website of the top 10 literary hoaxes, which includes everything from Ern Malley (the inspiration for Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake) to David Solway’s creation, Andreas Karavis.

One of the best articles on the controversy so far is on Slate, where journalist Seth Mnookin, who has dealt with his own addiction problems, says that Frey’s fabrications are typical of the insecurity that he often encountered in rehab: “Based on all the evidence, it seems Frey’s weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a ‘victim’ led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt.” Mnookin goes on to point out, however, that Frey’s fabrications are significant because of the simplistic message about addiction that the book reinforces.

Related links:
Click here for the AP story
Click here for the CBC Arts
Click here for the Slate article

Frey Week continues here on In Other Media. Today, we spotlight the transcript of the embattled author’s appearance on Larry King Live last night.

In defending his memoir A Million Little Pieces against charges that significant parts had been exaggerated or fabricated, Frey hit a few key messages again and again: that “memoir” means you’re allowed to make stuff up; that only a tiny portion of the book has been disputed; and that his story’s “essential truth” (a phrase he uttered seven times, according to the transcript) remains unaffected by any embellishments. Frey also brought out his own mother to plead his case, a move that seems a little incongruous with the macho posturing he’s known for.

Apparently his explanations were good enough for Oprah, who broke her silence on the controversy by calling into the King show, saying “although some of the facts have been questioned … the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me. And I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book and will continue to read this book.”

In Other Media, though, feels the need to point out a couple things. For one, that writers who prefer to get at “the essential truth” without being bound by the facts usually do so in books called “novels.” And that in fact Frey shopped his book as a novel before he and Doubleday decided to publish it as a memoir instead. (To be fair, King did grill Frey about that one a bit.) And finally, as for the “tiny portion” argument, the distortions and exaggerations that The Smoking Gun uncovered represent only the parts of Frey’s book that can be compared against public records. Most of the story takes place within the confidentiality-protected walls of a rehab clinic, and a couple of major characters are now dead.

Which means readers have to take Frey’s word for the accuracy of the bulk of the book — and why on Earth should they?

In Frey news closer to home, the Toronto Star’s Judy Stoffman reports that the author’s scheduled appearance at the Elgin Winter Garden in Toronto on Jan. 26 is still going ahead as planned.

Related links:
Click here for the transcript of the Larry King Live appearance
Click here for the Toronto Star piece

An article in today’s New York Times collects the responses, or lack thereof, to the allegations that James Frey falsified much of the content in his bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces. The publishers of the hardcover and paperback editions of the book, Doubleday and Anchor Books, respectively, both divisions of Random House, issued a joint statement that downplayed the importance of truth in memoirs. “Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence,” it read. “By definition, it is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided A Million Little Pieces was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections.” The statement continues: “Recent accusations against him notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.”

But Edward Wyatt, the writer of the Times article, says that the statement’s lack of definitive comment on the objective truth of the memoir suggests that little to no fact-checking was done by the book’s publishers. None will be done after the fact of publication, either, according to Doubleday and Anchor spokesperson Alison Rich. “This is not a matter that we deem necessary for us to investigate,” she said.

Needless to say, many readers are miffed and many key figures in the book’s publication and popularization, including Frey’s agent Kassie Evashevski, his editor Sean McDonald, who signed Frey on for two more books with the Penguin imprint Riverhead Books, and the one who started all the hoopla, Oprah Winfrey, were unavailable for comment.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

Investigative website The Smoking Gun has an extensive and well-nigh irrefutable article exposing the many exaggerations and fabrications in James Frey’s bestselling memoir of addiction, crime, and recovery, A Million Little Pieces. Many readers were introduced to the book on an Oprah tearfest in October, when Frey was interviewed for the show’s massively popular Book Club segment. The six-page Smoking Gun article refutes several of Frey’s tales of hard living, including his contentions that he was involved in a train accident, his various jail sentences, and a violent, crack-induced confrontation with police in Ohio. The article also documents Frey’s attempt to stop the site’s investigation into the veracity of his memoir.

Related links:
Read The Smoking Gun article

In USA Today, an article discusses the new “premium” format due to replace mass-market paperbacks. While Leslie Gelbman of Penguin blames the shift on the Oprah Club – its selections almost always come in trade paperback – Bantam Dell’s Irwin Applebaum says he doesn’t want to “monkey around” with the new format. Meanwhile, The Literary Saloon argues: “Trade-paperbacks are unwieldy, hard to handle and hold and, especially, to lug around. Pocket-books are a wonderful thing – indeed, we’d actually be willing to pay a premium for that format!”

Related links:
Click here for the article from USA Today
Click here for the response from The Literary Saloon

In The Globe and Mail, Gayle Macdonald interviews Michael Roizen, co-author of the recent blockbuster self-help title, You: The Owner’s Manual. Despite his health-conscious volume – which has been a hit since being featured on Oprah – Macdonald finds the author refreshingly realistic: “Roizen clearly gets the same Everyman cravings that afflict the rest of us. On a coffee table in his suite at Toronto’s Park Plaza Hotel are the remains of a Mr. Sub foot-long, which he washed down with a diet Coke.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The Globe and Mail

The Oprah’s Book Club debate continues: is it a boon to publishers and readers, or a danger to cultural vibrancy? Those who are still undecided may enjoy the lengthy back-and-forth discussion between authors Marianne Apostolides (Inner Hunger) and Heather Birrell (I Know You Are But What Am I?) on Bookninja.com. The thrust of the debate, which is lengthy but productive, could perhaps be summarized by Birrell’s first comment: “Oprah is nothing if not a thicket of contradictions. (Is that a mixed metaphor? Is Oprah a mixed metaphor?).”

Related links:
Click here for the Bookninja.com piece

Recently, an author association dubbed Word of Mouth has made headlines by begging talk-show host Oprah Winfrey to reinstate her book club. (Or, rather, to restore it to its original purpose of concentrating on current authors.) In an essay on Goodreports.net, Ontario book critic Alex Good suggests that Word of Mouth’s concerns are commercial ones masquerading as cultural ones. Responding to the group’s claim that “First novelists and literary authors felt emboldened to write because of the outside chance that an editor would see their work as potential Book Club material,” Good retorts: “Is that supposed to be a good thing? That first novelists were trying to write Oprah material? All the more reason for her to stay away, I’d say.”

Later in the piece, Good turns to the Oprah effect on readers. “How does it help contemporary fiction to have a bunch of dittoheads robotically going out and buying what they’re told? Is it turning them into readers, turning them on to reading? Obviously not. When Oprah stopped recommending contemporary fiction her loyal followers simply stopped reading contemporary fiction. Some influence.”

Related links:
Click here for Alex Good’s essay
Click here for a BBC News story about Word of Mouth