A theater in San Francisco has displayed posters for the forthcoming The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, the movie based on the fake life of fake and altogether nonexistent writer JT Leroy. Wisely, Palm Pictures has chosen to incorporate the hoax into their marketing tactics — one poster even includes far-too-long excerpts from the Times and New York articles about the scandal.
This week's edition of Reading About Reading is more late than Intern Alexis' period, but that's not gonna stop her from getting down to business with the Times Book Review in which Bernard-Henri L vy fights back while Jay McInerney's latest effort is flogged into submission. Add to that a light slapping of Siro Hustvedt, and you've got a gleefully angsty review. After the jump, Alexis wallows in the negativity.
Innovative sales techniques from the Soho Housing Works.
When buying on Amazon.com, it's interesting to see what other shoppers bought along with your item of choice. It would seem that users who inexplicably purchased Star Jones Reynolds' life-and-love book Shine also bought the tearjerker memoir written by the mother of murder victim Laci Peterson, a pairing so frequent that it has prompted Amazon to market a package deal.
A little behind on your reading? Brooks Brothers — the WASPtastic clothiers of stuffy fathers everywhere — offers a few literary selections, perfectly tailored to their consumers: A Lady at the Table, How to Raise a Lady, and How to Be a Lady. Not a bad selection, but if you head in-store and give the salesman that special, knowing wink, you also get a free copy of How to Beat a Lady.
In this week's installment of the Times Book Review, David Kamp faces backlash from the banjo-toting patriots of Appalachia, who seem to think that their trailerpark luxuries don't make them white trash. And they're right: trashy inbred babies know no color. Then there's an oh-so-timely, post-Fashion Week review written by none other than Josef Joffe, creator of our favorite "girl about town," Jessica Joffe. We've no idea if he's half as well-dressed, but if you imagine him writing the review while wearing Marc Jacobs, the whole thing reads a lot better. Intern Alexis holds your hand through all that, plus the horror of Ayelet Waldman, after the jump.
We received an unusually obtuse (and unusually witty) press release yesterday:
You cannot begin to imagine the elation we felt when, upon shuffling through our daily stack of hatemail, we came across an unmarked package smelling of lilacs. And oh, delight of delights, look what it contained — the memoir of Post columnist Bridget Harrison, Tabloid Love: Looking for Mr. Right in All the Wrong Places. (If your memory can still recall this past summer, UK import Harrison had been writing her own Sex and the City-ish column.)
If you're like us, you every now and then wonder what your favorite Times critics do when they're not busy criticizing for the Times. A.O. Scott, we imagine, stays up late critiquing the cinematography of Time-Life book-series informercials; Frank Bruni, we suspect, indulges a secret fondess for bologna and Velveeta on white; and Michiko Kakutani must sit around limning everything in sight while Alessandra Stanley, over at her own place, consistently dials wrong numbers. And what about second-string theater critic Charles Isherwood? What does he do in his spare time? An intrepid reader recently discovered:
Another bit on the JT Leroy mess: In addition to today's Times article, in which Geoffrey Knoop comes forward and claims that his partner Laura Alpert is the real JT Leroy (to reiterate: duh), New York makes mention of Geoffrey Knoop possibly shopping around a tell-all of his side of the story. This would coincide nicely with any sort of romantic issues Knoop and Alpert are rumored to be going through, though none of the legal-types involved with the Leroy/Albert/Knoop trifecta of bullshit claim to know anything about a book or a breakup.
Yeah, that's right: we totes saw our favorite anal-sex-memoirist Toni Bentley's review of Gail Sheehy's sexy old lady book, but we're not going there. The assfucking grandma jokes are just too easy, you know? Instead, Intern Alexis laughs at things that moan for dick. Six of one half, two dozen of the other. After the jump, her weekly rundown of what the literate people are reading.
Time Warner announced today that it has (finally!) sold off the Time Warner Book Group — Warner Books and Little, Brown — to the French publisher Lagardere. TWBG was part of Time Inc., and chairman Ann Moore sent a memo to her employees earlier today on the sale. It is, undoubtedly, an anxious time for book group employees, as it is always is when there are major corporate changes at your employer. But we suspect that in the long run the book folks will be the lucky ones.
The latest New York mag has a quick-n-dirty feature on Sean McDonald, the Riverhead editor who "championed" Fake Writer James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. McDonald has (wisely) stayed mostly silent during Oprah's post-Book Club ragefest, but he actually got on the phone (chaperoned by a publicist, of course) with New York's Dave Itzkoff. Curiously, Itzkoff even got some quotage from Frey himself, "just days" before the Smoking Gun published their report.
Bruce Benderson, Erica Jong and Naomi Wolf resist the urge to start an orgy.
Something truly special happened last night: a book party that actually didn't suck. Granted, it was totally Gay — but still! Penguin imprint Tarcher celebrated the release of Bruce Benderson's The Romanian — a homo-hot account of his affair with a Romanian street hustler — by throwing down at Nubla, courtesy of hosts John Waters and Blackbook magazine. It was a surprisingly glitzy affair, with Waters doing his adorably creepy thing, Benderson being leashed by a "minder," and Blackbook EIC Aaron Hicklin spinning like Pete Tong circa 1999. After the jump, staff photographer Nikola Tamindzic captures the sexually liberated literati.
Finally — courtesy of HotJobs — a chance to write a book for neither fame nor fortune:
The Times gives us a little summary as to what Fake Writer James Frey's has added to forthcoming editions of A Million Little Pieces in his new author's note: a little "I lied," a dash of "I'm sorry," and not a pinch of Oprah. Exactly what you expected, really.
James Frey bashing has quickly evolved into America's favorite new pastime, with millions gathering around the bean dip to catch its Super Bowl equivalent: a 60-minute Oprah inculpation so grisly, it might as well have been dubbed The Passion of the Frey. But once your tall-tale substance abuse memoir has been likened to Holocaust denial on national television, as America's Opinion Maker Oprah Winfrey nods her large, regal head in accord, is there really anywhere else this sport can go? Of course there is! Frey could be dropped by his "people" namely, his Brillstein-Grey literary manager Kassie Evashevski, who explained her logic to Publisher's Weekly:
Because Harlequin romance novels would rather die of a broken heart than be forgotten due to irrelevancy, they've teamed with NASCAR to create a new line of paperbacks geared towards the sensitive gearhead in us all:
• Publisher Nan Talese says she was tricked into going on Oprah. She had agreed to go on an episode discussing truth in America and how it led to the Frey situation, only to be bombarded by the fiery rage of Harpy McHarpo. Sandbagged or not, at least Talese got her teeth capped before the appearance. [NYO]
• Frey's literary and film agent Kassie Evashevski drops him, leaving him cold, lonely, and representation-less. She ends their relationship on an ominous note: "I suspect we haven't heard the last of James Frey." Well, no kidding — obviously this whole kerfuffle is fodder for his next book. [PW]
• Now everyone's coming clean: "My friend Karl and I did not overdose on a combination of cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy. We shared a bottle of Shiraz and fell asleep watching The Suite Life with Zack and Cody." [Banterist]
