Okay, I’ve completely missed the latest development in this nearly two-century-old controversy. Fortunately for me, Dan Kraus trolls for book news in the unlikeliest places. To be fair, I’m sure it was a saved keyword search that alerted him. Or maybe he found it on Salon first.

Long story short: there’s long been suspicion that Mary Shelley, given her inability to follow it up with another worldwide bestseller, didn’t write Frankenstein. A guy named John Lauritsen, a Harvard-educated independent scholar, has a book about it called The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein.

There’s a nice summary on Suicide Girls (”Who Wrote Frankenstein?“):

Now, however, one scholar is claiming that the story might not be true, at least when it comes to Mary Shelley and her monster. How did a marginally-educated nineteen-year old come up with what is now thought of as one of the first science-fiction novels, and why didn’t she ever write anything of merit again? Perhaps she wasn’t the author at all, according to John Lauritsen, who claims that Percy Bysshe Shelley actually wrote the novel.

They link to an article in Perth Now (”Frankenstein’s fraud“):

Even Mary seemed slightly amazed by the genesis of the monster when she was older.

Nearly a decade after her husband died in a boating accident, she wondered: “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea.”

And both sources cite the ever-citable Camille Paglia, who, on Salon (”Hilary vs. Obama: It’s a drawl!”) is in fine fettle:

This book, which is a hybrid of mystery story, polemic and paean to poetic beauty, shows just how boring literary criticism has become over the past 40 years. I haven’t been this exhilarated by a book about literature since I devoured Leslie Fiedler’s iconoclastic essays in college back in the 1960s. All that crappy poststructuralism that poured out of universities for so long pretended to challenge power but was itself just the time-serving piety of a status-conscious new establishment. Lauritsen’s book shows what true sedition and transgression are all about.

(227 blog reactions — about to be 1 more.)

I’m torn here. On the one hand, I love a good literary scandal, so I want to believe that Mr. Shelley wrote it. On the other hand, the original tale of the book’s origins is so great that I want to believe in Mrs. Shelley.

Maybe they wrote it together?

The culprit? A self-published author. Who claims he’s a lawyer. From Publishers Weekly (”Mystery Bookstores Solve Scam,” by Kevin Howell):

Dickey swallowed the feeling of being duped and launched a warning on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association listserv, saying, “I hate like hell committing my buffoonery to the world-at-large, but if it stops someone else from making my mistake, good. If it can expose the mean-spirited jackasses behind this scam, all the better.”

I like this story, but it would be even better if it ended with a shootout that takes place at the top of an under-construction skyscraper.

Now, I love Andre Agassi as much as anyone — well, not as much as Steffi Graf, though probably more than Brooke Shields – but this has got to stop. From the New York Post (”Agassi Book Aces $5M,” by Keith J. Kelly):

Although terms were not disclosed, the $5 million that insiders say Agassi scored catapults him into an exclusive memoir club that includes former President Clinton, who got an estimated $12 million, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who scored more than $8.5 million from Penguin Press, Hillary Clinton, who landed $8 million from Simon & Schuster, and Jack Welch, who got $7.1 million from TimeWarner Books (now a part of Hachette Books).

My favorite part?

President Clinton, who also published with Knopf, was said to have urged Agassi to go with his imprint.

I sure would have loved to hear that phone call. Perhaps Harry Shearer could re-create it for his wonderful Le Show. I love his “reenactments” of phone calls between G.W. and H.W. Bush.

So I’m almost done reading the new Jason Starr novel, The Follower. I liked his last one, Lights Out, but The Follower is testing my patience. Billed as a thriller, it’s not very thrilling. I suppose if I were invested in the characters I might find it suspenseful, but Starr doesn’t really write characters we care about, so it’s just slow. Sometimes I suspect he doesn’t care about his characters, either. It’s one thing to write a dark comedy about dim-bulbs, but if you don’t find a spark of humanity somewhere, it’s a hollow exercise.

The ARC has a prominent blurb from Bret Easton Ellis:

“Jason Starr is the first writer of his generation to convincingly update the modern crime novel by giving it provocative new spins.”

Like Bret Easton Ellis would know. It’s an old blurb, but B.E.E. would probably like The Follower — there are echoes of American Psycho. (In Manhattan, a stalker sets his sights on a shallow twentysomething woman and ends up bumping off her shallow, twentysomething suitors.) And, like B.E.E., Starr seems to feel that brand names can substitute for character traits.

Starr’s prose is fairly slack, and his dialog reminds me of being stuck on a bus next to a college student with a cell phone. Perhaps he’d argue that he’s parodying the way his characters speak — or capturing that of their real-life counterparts — but I can only take so much of:

“It’s still, like, really weird for me when I think about it.”

In Lights Out, the two main characters were childhood rivals — one of them is now a professional baseball player and the other is a housepainter — which was a creative premise with built-in tension. In The Follower, the characters don’t have interesting traits or connections. And where Lights Out was energetic, The Follower is so slow that I’ve had plenty of time to predict what’s going to happen — and I’m usually right.

Still, Starr’s star seems to be in ascendance (ouch), which puzzles me. Bafflingly, the ARC also has generous blurbs from George Pelecanos and Lee Child. I do think there’s an audience for Starr — those same people to whom brand names are an essential part of their vocabulary. But I wouldn’t recommend him to fans of Pelecanos and Child. Starr looks down on his characters, but he doesn’t show us any reason that he deserves to do so. And a better writer would find something to like — no matter how small — about his most pathetic creation.

For a past post on Lights Out, click here.

(That would be a good pen name, wouldn’t it? “Ellison Starr”?)

Oprah’s latest book club choice? Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever chosen as a book club selection before because it’s post-apocalyptic. (It is) Very unusual for me to select this book, but it’s fascinating,” Winfrey said.

I can’t wait for the interview.

It has come to my attention that Likely Stories is competing for “Best of the Blogs on Writing” – and I’m in last place. However, voting has been somewhat slow, so if even two satisfied readers are kind enough to cast their ballots for me, I will be catapulted into first place.

I can practically taste the glory.

Wordsworth Editions is tarting up Jane Austen. From The Guardian (”Jane too plain for publishers“):

Helen Trayler, the publisher’s managing director, said: “She was not much of a looker. Very, very plain. Jane Austen wasn’t very good looking. She’s the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn’t be very inspiring at all. It’s just a bit off-putting.

“I know you are not supposed to judge a book by its cover. Sadly people do. If you look more attractive, you just stand out more. Sadly, we do live in a very shallow world and people do judge by appearance.”

…and rather than wallow in sadness, we’re going to use photoshop to give her bigger breasts as well!

(Thanks, Dan.)

David Nasaw has won the New-York Historical Society American Book Prize for his book Andrew Carnegie (Penguin). They’re giving him $50,000 even though he’s not a poet. From the New York Times (”Carnegie Biography Wins History Prize“):

David Nasaw has been named the winner of the $50,000 New-York Historical Society American Book Prize for his biography, "Andrew Carnegie" (The Penguin Press). Mr. Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His book tells the rags-to-riches story of Carnegie, who became a steel baron and the richest man in the world before deciding to give away his fortune.

Historical Society board chairman Roger Hertog called it “magisterial,” which, incidentally, pops up 63 times in the 100,000-plus reviews on Booklist Online. Oh, the fun I have.

If she thinks this review was mean, what does she think of this one?

And what purpose would it serve – other than making Walter Mosley feel better about himself (and we’ve actually done quite a bit of that) — if we only wrote nice reviews?

From the Booklist Selection Policy:

Booklist operates under policies established by the Publishing Committee of the American Library Association. Its primary purpose is to provide a guide to current library materials in many formats appropriate for use in public libraries and school library media centers. The needs of small and medium-sized libraries receive special consideration in all selection decisions. All materials reviewed in the Adult Books, Books for Youth, and Media sections are recommended for purchase by libraries and media centers. This recommended-only policy, in place since Booklist’s founding in 1905, has been adapted over the decades to reflect changes in the philosophy of public library service. Thus, materials are recommended for reasons relating to both quality and demand. That is, books and media found wanting in terms of quality may still be recommended if the reviewer anticipates strong demand from library patrons. All reviews reflect critical evaluation and include comments on weaknesses and limitations as necessary.

Be sure to read Bill Ott’s review of 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, by Peter Golenbock, today’s Review of the Day. He didn’t like it very much. Another sports-related, quasifictional book, O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It, got more publicity for its role in the downfall of Judith Regan and Regan Books — but until another publisher steps up to the plate, as Lyons did here, the jury’s still out on that confession.

(I mixed those metaphors on purpose, darn it!)