As an update on yesterday’s post about Ishmael Beah, the author has unequivocally declared that his facts are correct. Publishers Weekly (”Ishmael Beah Takes Public Stand,” by Michael Coffey) reprints the full press release from his publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The war in Sierra Leone began in 1991. My story, as I remember it and wrote it, began in 1993 when rebels "attacked the mining areas" (my words from the book) in my village while I was away with friends. I never saw my family again. The Australian, presumably, is basing their defamation of me on reports that the Sierra Rutile Mine was closed down by rebels in 1995. But there were rebels in my region, my village, and my life in 1993. They attacked throughout 1993 and 1994 before closing down the mine.

…

I was right about my family. I am right about my story. This is not something one gets wrong. The Australian’s reporters have been calling my college professors, asking if I “embellished” my story. They published my adoptive mother’s address, so she now receives ugly threats. They have used innuendo against me when there is no fact. Though apparently, they believe anything they are told-unless it comes from me or supports my account. Sad to say, my story is all true. 

The tone of the Australian articles struck me as being far more gentle than “defamation,” but this impassioned response will certainly make some people wonder whether the reporters have made a sad story even sadder by quibbling over details. On the other hand, good reporters dig for truth, no matter where it takes them–and there’s no denying that Beah’s book is newsworthy.

It is interesting that Beah’s rebuttal doesn’t really give himself any wiggle room–which, if he was aware of any inaccuracy, might be the logical route. So, either he’s completely right, or he believes he’s completely right, or…he’s not going to admit that he’s not completely right. I’ll be curious how this one plays out.

(Odd thought: Isn’t it interesting that we want writers’ tales of woe to be true, even if it means that the writer suffered? That is–purely hypothetical, wild leap here–if Beah somehow turned out to be a middle-class kid who had made all of this up, we’d feel let down, maybe even angry that he hadn’t suffered the misery he’d written about. And would we feel that way because he was getting the world’s sympathy while others truly suffered–or would we just be mad at having been duped? One point of view might be that we should be grateful every time a sad story isn’t true, or isn’t quite as sad as we thought, or didn’t last as long as stated. And if I adopt that point of view, does that mean I forgive James Frey for not having suffered more?)

According to a recent report in The Australian (”Africa’s war child,” by Shelley Gare, Peter Wilson, and David Nason), the timeline is wrong in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The story of how the discrepancies came to light–and the responses of Beah’s publisher and guardian–are both fascinating and troubling. And while the book’s success and Beah’s visibility ensure that there will be a lot more talk about this, it’s likely to be a lot more delicate than the James Frey proceedings–as well it should be. Even if, as the article suggests, Beah’s time as a soldier lasted months, not years, no child should have to experience that kind of horror for even a moment. There are other questions worth asking, though.

If confirmed, the revelations do not mean Beah’s tale isn’t truly terrible. They don’t mean that he hasn’t been through experiences that most of us in the developed world will never have to face even in our nightmares. They don’t detract from the fact that, as his New York agent Ira Silverberg told Inquirer, of the inspiring book, “Beautiful things have come from the success he has seen.

He’s changing policy now; he testified before (the US) Congress; fought for the rights of the 300,000 …”

But this does raise questions about the way Ishmael Beah’s book came about and how thoroughly his story was checked out.

Does our enduring hunger for authentic stories, for human symbols, and for stories of redemption cause us to vet some stories less thoroughly than others? Interestingly, Frey’s own troubles triggered a halfhearted fact-check.

In an earlier interview with The Los Angeles Times, Crichton said she had asked Beah to vouch for the accuracy of his story after the memoirist James Frey had confessed to making up material in his own book. Times reporter Josh Getlin wrote: “Crichton was willing to take the leap after Beah assured her that he has a ‘photographic memory’. He reminded her that he had grown up in a culture with a long-standing oral tradition and had learned to tell stories from memory around a fire.”

(An interesting and probably unrelated side note is that Beah’s agent is Ira Silverberg, who also repped JT Leroy.)

A follow-up article yesterday (”Ishmael Beah’s flaws ‘poetic licence,’” by David Nason and Shelley Gare) featured thoughtful remarks from Dan Chaon (You Remind Me of Me, 2004) who, as a creative writing professor, helped Beah shape his first draft. Given his own interests as a novelist, Chaon was more interested in the storytelling than the dateline:

“If it turns out there are factual errors, I wouldn’t necessarily be all that concerned about it,” said Professor Chaon of Ohio’s Oberlin College.

“I don’t think the book is being presented as a piece of journalism. It’s being presented as a memoir.”

This seems to be the increasingly accepted point of view: in a memoir, expect some inaccuracy. And I can certainly agree with that. Without perfect memory, no memoirist is going to be as good as a reporter. (And lots of reporters have been reported to have their own problems.) But when the memoir isn’t about the writer’s wacky family–indeed, when the memoir has its own effect on world events–it would behoove the publisher to fact-check it as carefully as possible, knowing the kind of scrutiny it’s going to come under. And if some of the facts are in doubt, just say so.

I wouldn’t take a young person’s word about their experiences verbatim, regardless of what their experiences have been–but that doesn’t mean I’d discount the essential truth of their experience, either.

The 2008 Edgar Nominees have been announced.

Best Novel

Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black (Holt)
Priest, by Ken Bruen (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
Soul Patch, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Bleak House)
Down River, by John Hart (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best First Novel By An American Author

Missing Witness, by Gordon Campbell (Morrow)
In the Woods, by Tana French (Viking)
Snitch Jacket, by Christopher Goffard (Rookery)
Head Games, by Craig McDonald (Bleak House)
Pyres, by Derek Nikitas (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best Paperback Original

Queenpin, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
Blood of Paradise, by David Corbett (Random House/Mortalis)
Cruel Poetry, by Vicki Hendricks (Serpent’s Tail)
Robbie’s Wife, by Russell Hill (Hard Case Crime)
Who Is Conrad Hirst? by Kevin Wignall (Simon & Schuster)

Best Critical/Biographical

The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction, by Patrick Anderson (Random)
A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational, by Maurizio Ascari (Macmillan)
Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction, by Christiana Gregoriou (Macmillan)
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (Penguin)
Chester Gould: A Daughter’s Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy, by Jean Gould O’Connell (McFarland)

Best Fact Crime

The Birthday Party, by Stanley Alpert (Putnam)
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi (Norton)
Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit, by Kerry Max Cook (Morrow)
Relentless Pursuit: A True Story of Family, Murder, and the Prosecutor Who Wouldn’t Quit, by Kevin Flynn (Putnam)
Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, The Murders and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson (Viking)

Best Short Story

“The Catch,” from Still Waters, by Mark Ammons (Level Best)
“Blue Note,” from Chicago Blues, by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Bleak House)
“Hardly Knew Her,” from Dead Man’s Hand, by Laura Lippman (Harcourt)
“The Golden Gopher,” Los Angeles Noir, by Susan Straight (Akashic)
“Uncle,” from A Hell of a Woman, by Daniel Woodrell (Busted Flush)

Best Young Adult

Rat Life, by Tedd Arnold (Dial/Sleuth)
Diamonds in the Shadow, by Caroline B. Cooney (Delacorte)
Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin (Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing - Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Blood Brothers, by S.A. Harazin (Delacorte)
Fragments, by Jeffry W. Johnston (Simon & Schuster/Simon Pulse)

Best Juvenile

The Name of This Book is Secret, by Pseudonymous Bosch (Little, Brown)
Shadows on Society Hill, by Evelyn Coleman (American Girl)
Deep and Dark and Dangerous, by Mary Downing Hahn (Clarion)
The Night Tourist, by Katherine Marsh (Hyperion)
Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things, by Wendelin Van Draanen (Knopf)

Best Play

If/Then, by David Foley (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)
Panic, by Joseph Goodrich (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)
Books, by Stuart M. Kaminsky (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)

Best Television Episode Teleplay

“It’s Alive,” Dexter, by Daniel Cerone (Showtime)
“Yahrzeit,” Waking the Dead, by Declan Croghan & Barbara Machin (BBC America)
“Pie-Lette,” Pushing Daisies, by Bryan Fuller (ABC/Warner Bros Television)
“Senseless,” Law & Order: Criminal Intent, by Julie Martin & Siobhan Byrne O’Connor (Wolf Films/NBC Universal)
“Pilot,” Burn Notice, by Matt Nix (USA Network/Fox Television Studios)

Best Motion Picture Screen Play

Eastern Promises, by Steven Knight (Focus Features)
The Lookout, by Scott Frank (Miramax)
Michael Clayton, by Tony Gilroy (Warner Bros. Pictures)
No Country for Old Men, by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the book by Cormac McCarthy (Miramax)
Zodiac, by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Robert L. Fish Memorial Award

“The Catch,” from Still Waters, by Mark Ammons (Level Best)
The Simon & Schuster - Mary Higgins Clark Award

In Cold Pursuit, by Sarah Andrews (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
Wild Indigo, by Sandi Ault (Penguin/Berkley Prime Crime)
Inferno, by Karen Harper (Harlequin/MIRA)
The First Stone, by Judith Kelman (Penguin/Berkley Prime Crime)
Deadman’s Switch, by Barbara Seranella (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Publishers, heed Edward Champion’s demand that we “Stop bowdlerising books for kids“! (British spelling because it’s in the Guardian’s theblogbooks.)

Perhaps this new emphasis on books-as-manuals is why today’s children’s book publishers have been more gutless when reissuing their backlist titles. Presumably motivated by the fear of “corrupting” young minds and offending readers, publishers have edited and elided passages and pictures with a politically correct zeal resembling Soviet agitprop.

Great links to the new and old versions of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, too.

Youth fantasy fans are no doubt excited to learn the release date and title of Christopher Paolini’s new book. The date? September 20. The title?

Um…Brisingr?

A bit of a surprise after Eragon (2003) and Eldest (2005). And, I have to say, it doth not play trippingly on the tongue. In a strange way it reminds me of Pogo.

(Via Publishers Weekly.)

That naughty library exhibit in Paris is finally open (”A Library Exhibition Not for the Children’s Room,” New York Times):

"Hell at the Library, Eros in Secret," which opened at the National Library here last month, offers a peek at its secret archive of erotic art, putting on display more than 350 sexually explicit literary works, manuscripts, engravings, lithographs, photographs, film clips, even calling cards and cardboard pop-ups.

Visitors to the library can listen to a modern-day recording of an 18th-century "dialogue" during sex (simultaneous orgasms included) and watch a six-minute excerpt from a grainy black-and-white silent pornography film made in 1921 (one man, two women, intriguing lingerie).

Writer Elaine Sciolino uses the exhibit as a jumping-off point to discuss shifts in French public morality, vis-a-vis l’affaire Sarkozy et cetera. (Yes, I’m mixing French and Latin, and poorly–you want to make something out of it?) Frankly (pun fully intended), France is starting to depress me a little bit. If they renounce short workdays, joie de vivre, and amour, the best way to visit will be via literature. If I want to observe a workaholic, sexually conflicted society, I can always stay home.

Before he died, Vladimir Nabokov left explicit instructions that his final, unfinished, work–called Laura–be destroyed. That hasn’t happened yet, and Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir’s heir and the man with a key to the lock-box, hasn’t decided whether he’ll honor his father’s wishes or not. On Slate (”Dmitri’s Choice“), Nabokovian Ron Rosenbaum (should be the name of a pickpocket in a Robert Coover novel, don’t you think?) airs his own “deeply divided feelings” on the matter, and asks you to weigh in, too.

Dmitri’s predicament goes beyond Laura. It’s one that raises the difficult issue of who “owns” a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in?

Personally, I think this would make a great reality-TV show, one that would probably get around the writers’ strike even though a writer’s work offers the central dilemma. The burning–or dousing–would take place live, natch.

My own vote: burn it! Even after death, a writer deserves a voice in whether his work is published or not. And what’s wrong with a little mystery in life? It’s probably just as much fun to speculate about the manuscript (if you read the article, you’ll learn that there isn’t even that much of it) as it is to read the real thing.

Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and Chris Ware (Acme Novelty Library 16) vote for the latter (”Graphic Novelists Eschew Term “Graphic Novel,” Galleycat).

In the nomenclative tussle of Graphic Novel vs. Comic Book, two of the genre’s highest profile creators prefer the latter term. “I don’t like ‘graphic novel,’” Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi told the Wall Street Journal recently. “It’s a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating–it’s just a media type.” She added that fellow cartoonist Chris Ware feels the same. “He says [the term ‘graphic novel’] sounds like Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” said Satrapi.

When Cassie Edwards was accused of plagiarism, one of her publishers quickly jumped to her defense. Now they’re taking one big step back (”A Romance Novelist Is Accused of Copying,” by Felicia R. Lee, New York Times):

"Our original comments were based on Signet’s review of a limited selection of passages," Mr. Burke’s statement said. "We believe the situation deserves further review. Therefore we will be examining all of Ms. Edwards’s books that we publish, and based on the outcome of that review we will take action to handle the matter accordingly. We want to make it known that Signet takes any and all allegations of plagiarism very seriously."

A long but interesting piece on author anonymity–and pseudonymity–in the Guardian (”The great unknown“). The proudly bylined John Mullan examines the reasons that writers, from Sir Walter Scott to Joe Klein, have chosen to hide in plain sight. His conclusion? That writers don’t do it because they’re afraid:

Indeed, in these cases as in many others, the authors did not really expect to remain hidden. If you follow in any detail the use of anonymity by literary writers - satirists, poets, dramatists and novelists - you will find that only rarely was final concealment the aim. Provoking curiosity and conjecture - highlighting the very question of authorship - was more often the calculated effect.

Or, more succinctly:

The main lesson is a simple one: that anonymity is most successful when it provokes the search for an author.