James Frey and the Marlboro man

After being much-chastised for trying to pass his first novel off as a memoir, James Frey, author of a A Million Little Pieces, is preparing to release a new novel in May. Apparently embracing his controversial side, Frey has asked artist Richard Prince to design the cover for Bright Shiny Morning, Page Six reports.

Prince has been shaking up the New York art scene with his highly sought-after photographs of billboards, such as Marlboro ads – works that were originally created by other photographers.

Bookmarks – hello Barthelme, goodbye Richard & Judy, and more

Some book-related links:

• 45 posthumous stories from Donald Barthelme (New York magazine)
• Richard & Judy to call it quits (CBC.ca)
• For nerds who love words: new virtual hangout for Star Wars poets (Paul Vermeersch)
• Settlement reached in James Frey kerfuffle (Yahoo)
• Biographizing living authors can be tricky (The New York Times)

He’s back: HarperCollins buys Frey novel

Disgraced memoirist James Frey – who was made a star when Oprah Winfrey chose his book A Million Little Pieces for her book club, then humiliated when she berated him for embellishing the facts in said book – is showing signs of getting his career back on track.

After the Pieces scandal broke, Frey’s publisher, Riverhead, bailed on a deal to release his following two books. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, HarperCollins Canada has bought Frey’s first novel (insert the snide aside of your choice here).

Bright Shiny Morning will appear in summer 2008; according to the WSJ story, “The new book is set in contemporary Los Angeles and tracks the lives of various characters from different backgrounds. These include a male movie star, a Mexican maid, and a homeless man from Venice Beach.” No word on whether there’s a subplot involving a misunderstood artiste and a mean talk-show host.

James Frey may be a liar, but Oprah is rude, says Nan Talese

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.

Once more, with feeling

Our BookExpo Canada preview, from the June issue of Q&Q.

Tentative optimism seems to be the general mood going into BookExpo Canada this year. After some exhibitor grumbling last year about high costs and low returns associated with the annual trade show, Reed Exhibitions is adding BOOKED!, a consumer book festival running alongside the convention. Hopes are high that the move will reinvigorate BookExpo, but as of late April (Q&Q’s press time), few details about the consumer event had been made public, leaving some publishers anxious to solidify plans.

BOOKED will run from June 7 through 9 (the BookExpo trade show will follow on June 10 and 11), and is being overseen by Geoffrey Taylor, director of International Readings at Harbourfront. The festival will be made up of two dozen events, half of them free and the others ranging in ticket price from $10 to $25, in locations across Toronto. BookExpo attendees will have to pay just like everyone else. Taylor says the aim is to have the festival pay for itself through ticket sales, and he was planning to put out a call for volunteers in May. “The whole thing’s supposed to be revenue-neutral,” says Taylor. “There are people out trying to find corporate partners, but from a planning point of view we’re trying to make it pay for itself.”

As for the lineup, Taylor says exhibiting publishers put forth 250 author names, which a selection committee (made up of reps from publishing and bookselling associations, as well as Taylor and BookExpo event director Dahlia de Rushe) has narrowed to around 50 for the inaugural year. But while publishers have been informed which of their authors made the cut – the list reportedly includes Naomi Klein, Jeannette Walls, David Bezmozgis, and Michael Redhill – no one has yet seen a detailed program. “You’re sort of presenting your authors blind,” says Lindsey Lowy, marketing manager for HarperCollins Canada. “You don’t really know what they’re getting into…. It’s difficult to put forth your best authors.” Still, Lowy has Richard B. Wright, Barbara Haworth-Attard, Susan Juby, and Kenneth Oppel all attending BOOKED.

And Taylor now says some BOOKED events will spill over the June 7-9 parameters. For example, H.B. Fenn and Company is bringing author James Patterson to both BOOKED and BookExpo, as part of his first Canadian tour in many years. Patterson’s BOOKED event is to take place on June 10, the first day of the trade show, but publicity manager Janis Ackroyd says she still doesn’t have a specific time, and the delays are holding back Fenn’s plans for the trade show as well: “We want to have Patterson in our booth, but we can’t determine the time of his booth appearance until we know all the details for BOOKED, which throws off the whole schedule because other authors don’t know their time,” says Ackroyd.

Taylor, for his part, concedes that the BOOKED committee is behind on the original schedule, but not, he says, “dangerously behind.” One major event has been booked for the John Bassett Theatre, while a children’s program has been scheduled for Fort York on the Friday. Taylor says most paid events have locations lined up, with only the free events still unsecured. And as part of an agreement with Toronto’s Luminato arts festival, also in its first year and running over the first week of June, the two festivals will share a space in a Luminato tent for at least one event.

BOOKED aside, it also remains to be seen how this year’s BookExpo convention and trade show will shake out. Last year’s trade show actually saw a noticeable increase in attendance, with 6,013 people attending, up 33% from the previous year. Bookseller numbers also rebounded, with a 15% increase, as 2,517 booksellers attended the show. But that still came against a backdrop of publisher concerns about high costs and few on-site orders. For years, BookExpo has been more of a networking event than a sales-generating one, but last year there was a renewed questioning of the status quo.

And this year, some exhibitors are slightly shrinking their presence. Simon & Schuster Canada, Random House of Canada, and the Literary Press Group are all reducing the size of their booths. LPG executive director Ronda Kellington says their booth will still feature author events, with an emphasis on first-time authors, but she expects that even fewer publishers than the 22 from last year will be represented. Heidi Winter, vice-president of marketing at H.B. Fenn, says the firm is producing fewer displays for its booth. And Whitecap Books, a perennial best-booth winner, won’t have its own booth at all this year, but will be exhibiting within the booth of its North American distributor, Firefly Books. Vice-president Nick Rundall says Whitecap will still have authors at the booth and blow-ups of the covers, and that the changes are for the ease of the booksellers – “assuming there are any.”

Still, most publishers are both returning and sticking to their booth size. “I remember last year there was that hooha about, ‘Oh, we should cancel BookExpo,’” says McArthur & Company president Kim McArthur. “I was never of the opinion that we should cancel BookExpo Canada.… I really always thought that it was extremely important to retain our own Canadian trade show for our own booksellers and our own authors and own companies.”

BOOKED isn’t the only addition to this year’s fest – Reed has also developed a new program for the trade show floor to spotlight children’s books, in an effort to attract more teachers and librarians. “Our Choice Best Bets” will feature 20 children’s authors and illustrators; each will speak for five minutes about a topic of their choice related to their new title. The Canadian Children’s Book Centre organized the event, which will take place on the presentation stage on both days of the trade show. The artists taking part in the program represent a cross-section of genres and target ages and include author team Jane Drake and Ann Love (whose Sweet! is reviewed on page 47 of this issue), creative non-fiction writer Barbara Greenwood, and author/illustrator Veronika Martenova Charles. But the list is also heavily Ontario-based, with only six participants coming from other provinces, including B.C. author kc dyer, Monique Polak from Quebec, and Nova Scotian illustrator Susan Tooke.

Young adult author Don Aker, one writer on the bill, says the time he gets with the audience will be worth the expense of coming from Nova Scotia. (Aker is mostly covering his own travel expenses, though his publisher, HarperCollins Canada, is footing his hotel bill.) He says his decision to come is spurred by the great reception Ontario teachers and librarians have given him in the past; the Ontario department of education approved his novel First Stone years before Nova Scotia tagged the work for classroom use.

Another addition to the trade show is a mystery event organized by Bloody Words, the annual Canadian mystery-writing conference of the same name. In the same vein as Best Bets, mystery authors will give readings on the presentation stage over the two days of the trade show. Cheryl Freedman, an organizer of the Bloody Words conference, says the final number of authors appearing is still undecided, but there will be fewer than at the Best Bets presentation, to allow the writers more time to read; some authors expected to appear include Linwood Barclay, Lyn Hamilton, Louise Penny, and Mary Jane Maffini.

Susan Dayus, the Canadian Booksellers Association’s executive director, says the author breakfasts and lunches, for both adult and children’s authors, will continue this year, with four in total. At press time the CBA was still contemplating opening up Saturday’s adult fiction lunch ­– which features Elizabeth Hay, Frances Itani, and Richard B. Wright – to the public. (The full breakfast and lunch lineups appear on pages 30-31.)

•••

As usual, the convention will kick off with two full days of professional development programming. Humber College and the Book and Periodical Council organized Friday’s publishing-focused lineup, “Devices and Desires,” while the CBA is running its annual “Super Saturday” programming for booksellers.

Friday’s lineup will address how new technology, especially the Internet, affects the publishing industry, and how publishers can reach online communities of readers. Cynthia Good, director of Humber’s Creative Book Publishing program, says the presentations and seminars look at how the future of book publishing can be seen now. “I believe that it’s no longer talking about a future – what will be the future of the book business and books and writing and bookselling and the whole book world,” says Good. “Everything is happening right now and we need to find a way to both learn and adjust creatively.”

The keynote speaker is Bob Young, founder of the print-on-demand website Lulu.com, who will argue that self-publishing is changing the publishing business. To balance Young’s viewpoint, former CBC Radio personality Mary Lou Finlay will be the responder, speaking for more traditional publishing models and touching on the issue of maintaining quality and standards. Attendees also have a choice of two workshops from a list of six that address new methods in marketing and promotion. Good says seminars are available both for the technologically savvy and for publishers new to online possibilities. (The cost of the day is up slightly to $125, though a reduced fee of $75 is available to students and members of The Writers’ Union of Canada; a full list of the day’s programming appears on pages 30-31.)

On the “Super Saturday” front, the CBA is expanding its members’ forum this year, after a strong response last year. “They kept bringing in chairs,” says Susan Dayus. “We had people up the aisles, up the front, down the back standing.” This year, the forum is being opened up to include non-CBA members – though attendance is still restricted to booksellers – and accordingly, it’s being renamed the Booksellers’ Industry Forum. Booksellers will also have more time to discuss ideas, as the roundtables following the forum are longer.

At the forum, the CBA will also unveil the results of an industry survey commissioned last year to measure Canadian booksellers’ profitability. And in its trade show booth, the association will be selling a manual for training new staff who have no previous experience in the book industry. Various CBA board directors helped write the manual, which will cost just under $20.

As organizers and exhibitors pull together the final details of this year’s show, they do so while facing the usual complaints about BookExpo, such as its seemingly permanent location in Toronto. Somewhat surprisingly, last year’s main complaint – the lack of firm orders – appears almost forgotten in the advent of BOOKED. The LPG’s Ronda Kellington, for example, refers to the expectation of order-taking at the trade show as “old-fashioned.” Says Kellington: “We thought there was good energy in our booth [last year]. We just want to create some energy, we want to get people into the booth, have a lot of traffic … and get LPG and our publishers into their brains for the fall.”

According to Reed’s Dahlia de Rushe, attendees will have an opportunity to express any concerns with the show, as Reed will once again solicit a cross-section of industry representatives for feedback. An advisory board will be set up following the close of this year’s show to “give direction on major strategic changes and major objectives,” says de Rushe.

For now, most publishers say they’re still committed to the trade show and are going in with a positive attitude. “All the publishers big and small have kind of come together to really try and reinvigorate BEC this year,” says Simon & Schuster’s vice-president of marketing and publicity, Rosslyn Junke, who was on BOOKED’s author selection committee. “People have put their best foot forward this year.”

Still, BOOKED may add more pressure for this year’s show to perform well. Random House director of marketing Linda Scott, who is co-chair of the marketing team behind the readers’ festival, is hoping that attendees will not be overly critical of the new venture. “Realistically, with change there are growing pains,” says Scott. “I would hope … people aren’t looking so critically at the initial changes that if it wasn’t perfect they would throw up their hands and say it didn’t work.”

THIS STORY HAS BEEN CORRECTED: A passage mistakenly stating that the McArthur & Company booth will have a new layout this year has been deleted.

Happy New Year: looking back

Just before 2006 gave out its last gasp, a number of book commentators took a look back at a year in books that was, if not quite horribilis, at least a little disappointingis.

Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman came up with his own list of “literary losers” of the year. The not-much-missed Judith Regan ranks high for the O.J. fiasco, as does our own Alberto Manguel for the year’s “most pretentious comment.” Manguel’s crime was picking, as his favourite book of the year, “a 50-page-long essay by the Hungarian scholar László Földényi, Dosztojevszkij Szibérában Hegelt Olvassa, és sírva fakad (Dostoyevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and weeps).” Kelly notes that “although he confesses to having no Hungarian, Manguel chose to reproduce the title in that language.”

In the Toronto Star, resident critic Philip Marchand runs through some of the more noteworthy book moments of the year — the James Frey scandal, the deaths of Irving Layton and Mickey Spillane, the use of a wildly inappropriate metaphor in Michael Redhill’s latest novel — and tries to suss out what they mean to the larger culture. (Marchand gets more than halfway through the piece before mentioning his onetime biographical subject Marshall McLuhan, which is actually pretty good for him.) He also has a piece on the “critical shots of the year” that is well worth reading.

And finally, The Globe and Mail asked a number of writers and celebrities for their favourite reads of the year. Many of the choices are predictable — lots of non-fiction about looming ecological disasters — but one notable pick comes from Vincent Lam, whose Bloodletting won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for 2006. Lam picks Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, which had been the odds-on favourite to win the prize. Perhaps this kind of gracious, peacemaking gesture will set the tone for the coming year. And if not, well, graciousness and peace are boring, anyway.

Related links:
The Scotsman‘s literary losers of 2006
Read Philip Marchand on the year in books
Read Marchand on the year in literary criticism
Read the favourites in The Globe and Mail

Frey speaks, selectively

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

The Irish James Frey?

The Guardian features an article today about Kathy O’Beirne, whose bestselling memoir Don’t Ever Tell (sold as Kathy’s Story in Ireland) came under fire yesterday from seven of her brothers and sisters, who “denounced the book as a work of fiction.”

The memoir is an account of O’Beirne’s life from the age of eight to 21, during which time she was allegedly placed in various Catholic foster services, including one of the notorious Magdalene laundries. The Guardian describes the book as “a grim catalogue of sexual abuse, beatings and rape.”

Her siblings are looking to have the book taken off shelves, but Mainstream, her publisher in Edinburgh, supports the book, insisting that they “took steps” before publishing that “included working closely with Kathy O’Beirne and providing the opportunity for comment or correction to the archdiocese of Dublin by submitting relevant material to it.”

However, one of the institutions implicated in the book, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, has also dismissed it as unreliable.

Quillblog wonders: who is Ireland’s equivalent to Oprah?

Related links:
Read The Guardian story here

Frey’s money-back guarantee

The New York Times confirms a story that appeared on Radaronline.com earlier this week that “James Frey, the author who admitted making up portions of his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and his publisher, Random House, have agreed in principle on a settlement with readers who filed lawsuits claiming they had been defrauded.”

The Times relies on an anonymous source for details of the settlement because it has yet to be approved by a judge, but states that “consumers who bought the book on or before Jan. 26 – when both the publisher and author released statements acknowledging that Mr. Frey had altered certain facts – will be eligible for a full refund.” If you didn’t keep your receipt, the publisher will accept some other proofs of purchase such as a particular page of the hardcover novel or the paperback’s front cover.

Quillblog prefers the more creative terms set out in a mock memo from Random House on Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog. The memo promises a refund of $4.24 for anyone returning the dust jacket with a hand-drawn moustache on the author’s photo, and a special offer: “If you send us a videotape, a VCD, or a DVD, in which you can demonstrate that you led or coerced a group of people to throw at least 200 copies into a public bonfire, we would like to offer you a promising career here at Random House.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The New York Times
Click here for Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog

Real cash for fake book

Radar Online is reporting that Random House U.S. is looking to settle the various class-action lawsuits brought against it by readers of James Frey’s notoriously fictional memoir A Million Little Pieces who claim they were victims of fraud.

As part of the settlement, Random House (which has not confirmed any of the details of the story) will offer a full refund to all who bought the book before it was officially announced to contain many, mmm, embellishments. The catch: you need your original sales receipt to claim the money, so unless you’ve been using it as a bookmark, tough luck.

Another unconfirmed rumour has it that Random House is planning to send an English professor to the home of every enraged reader of Frey’s tome to explain the meaning of the expression “caveat lector.”

Related links:
Read the Radar Online story here