Last week, Amazon's Canadian site somehow got glitched to reveal the names of the writers of anonymous user reviews — which gave everyone a little peek into the world of friends pimping friends' books and bitter unpublished writers trashing other writers. (It seems Amazon is sort of like, oh, any street corner in lower Manhattan.)

"Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, winner of the National Book Award, said that a first book by Tom Bissell last fall was 'crudely and absurdly savaged' on Amazon in anonymous reviews he believed were posted by a group of writers whom Mr. Bissell had previously written about in the literary magazine The Believer," says the NYT. (For the record, Franzen blurbed Bissell's book.)

In July 2003, Bissell wrote about This Group of People Who Will Not Be Named (because they militantly send the most fucking annoying emails in the world) for the Believer. Using the greatest tool at their disposal — Amazon customer reviews — this group mounted a campaign to singlehandedly destroy Bissell's career. What's next — they're gonna put up fake Nerve ads to embarrass Bissell? Oooh, harsh.

The gang also trashed a book by Believer editor Heidi Julavits on Amazon, so her pal Dave Eggers — shockingly! — gave her a nice review. This scandal of influence and corruption clearly threatens to destroy the social fabric of the literary world!

[Update: The ULA itself writes in: "This is absolutely false. We have not posted anonymous reviews to Amazon. We sign our names to everything. You are posting false information on your site and should either correct it or remove it." I am shocked — who would accuse Gawker of posting false information? That's just crazy! We have an accuracy rate hovering near 60%!]

Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers [NYT]

Chasing the Sea

Amazon reviewers brought to book [Observer]