An Embarassment of Riches...

It's a smorgasbord this morning... All of it fine blogging material and ripe for some serious consideration.
First a curio:
HarperCollins Buys Series From James Frey - NYTimes.com
Frey seems to have weathered the hoax storm quite well, and might be on his way to being the next Lemony Snicket. Though, this book of his which he is reported to have 'conceptualised' (but not actually written, it seems) is about a bunch of alien teenagers who come to earth to escape something-or-other which just sounds like someone got together over Starbucks and said "Right, how do we make ourselves a fat wad of cash on movie rights". Which, of course, is precisely what happened. A sociological study of Manhattan publishing industry-types, NOW, that really would be a study worth doing...

Next up, inspired by the Frey story I linked my way over to the full NYT rundown on Herman Rosenblatt (who came after Frey but before Seltzer). Read the whole deal here. Basically, Rosenblatt wrote a short romance story that was really too good to be true, he won a competition and took his wife out to a swell restaurant. Nice. Somewhere along the line in 1996 Oprah read about the story and the Rosenblatts when on the air to celebrate the trueness of their love. Which is funny, right? "True love" - fake story. Anyway, Rosenblatt never bothered to mention that his story was, erm, a *story* and so the whole Holocaust-survivor-love-story shtick turned out to be a real column-hogger (who'da thunkit?). Now we discover Rosenblatt fabricated his memoir. Awesome. Perhaps most awesome is the comment by Kurt Anderson noted at the end of this article which I think will be the basis for the next article I write... "Mr. Anderson compated Mr. Rosenblatt to Bernard L. Madoff, the money manager who is accused of frauding investors of $50 billion." Fraud and the fall-out of our GFC? Literary frauds, the crisis of confidence...

And finally a little coda on the case of the Bitter Novelist Who Tweets story. It's this story that makes me think we're crying out for some kind of investigation into digital media and its influence on good ol' gentlemanly publishing... Snark, Eggers, the hoaxing authors, the frantic publishers without fact checkers, the Amazon critics who turn out to be authors... It all just goes to show what a sneaky (snarky) bitchy world the writer lives in. It's like gawker but with beards....