Actually, I don’t think I can blame Ed Champion for this one. The last video was funny. I don’t think this one is supposed to be funny.

Don’t feel obligated to watch the whole thing. Please.

The 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize regional winners have been announced.

Africa

Best Book: The Hangman’s Game, by Karen King-Aribisala (Peepal Tree) (Nigeria)

Best First Book: Imagine This, by Sade Adeniran (SW) (Nigeria)

Canada and Caribbean

Best Book: The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins) (Canada)

Best First Book: The End of the Alphabet, by CS Richardson (Doubleday Canada) (Canada)

Europe and South Asia

Best Book: Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha (Simon and Schuster) (India)

Best First Book: A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam (HarperCollins) (Bangladesh)

South East Asia and South Pacific

Best Book: The Time We Have Taken, by Steven Carroll (HarperCollins) (Australia)

Best First Book: The Anatomy of Wings, by Karen Foxlee (Univ. Queensland) (Australia)

A long time ago, back in the pre-embedded video days, I saved some links that I found, I think, via Edward Champion. Why, here’s one now!

From the Washington Post (”Australian Author Wins Lindgren Award,” by Malin Rising):

STOCKHOLM, March 12 — Australian author Sonya Hartnett is the winner of the $818,000 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature, the largest children’s book award in the world.

Hartnett, 39, published her first novel, “Trouble All the Way,” at the age of 15 and since then has written 18 novels for children, young people and adults.

The jury praised her “linguistic virtuosity and brilliant narrative technique” and said her works are “a source of strength.”

According to the jury’s citation, “Sonya Hartnett is one of the major forces for renewal in modern young adult fiction. With psychological depth and a concealed yet palpable anger, she depicts the circumstances of young people without avoiding the darker sides of life.”

Recent books by Hartnett include The Silver Donkey (2006), the Printz Honor Book Surrender (2006), and Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf (2005).

Quadruple-threat Dan Kraus (editor/writer/filmmaker/champion pastry chef) alerted me to a simple hack that allows me to embed video in this here WordPress blog. So I’m going to go ahead and do that–and what better test case than a video shot and edited by multiple-hyphenate Dan Kraus?

Hey, it works!

Seattle’s influence in the world of books looms large of late, but Nancy Pearl can’t take all the credit–no, she has to share it with Amazon, Starbucks, and Costco. In the New York Times (”Book Lovers Ask, What’s Seattle’s Secret?”), Julie Bick examines the retail giants’ bookselling strategies: microlevel, one-book-fits-all, and by-the-pallet. Perhaps because it’s Seattle, the executives speak of “ideals,” “an old-fashioned outlook,” and, in the case of Costco, “profit.”

Also from Seattle but at the other end of the spectrum, independent bookselling, Paul Constant discusses The Perils and Pleasures of Chasing Book Thieves (”Flying Off the Shelves,” The Stranger). Great intro, strong language:

In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting “Drop the book!” I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, “Here are your fucking books!” and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.

Before this essay I had never come across the term “antisellers,” nor had I considered the “New York Times best-seller list of stolen books.”

Kate Christensen is the winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, for her novel The Great Man (Doubleday). From the Washington Post (”Behind Every Great Man . . . ” by Bob Thompson):

“I’m really shocked,” she said in a telephone interview. To her, an award like the PEN/Faulkner “always seemed unattainable.” Among other reasons, in the 28 years it has existed, only four other women have won.

“It’s me and John Updike and Philip Roth. I was like, do women actually win this thing?” Christensen joked.

From Donna Seaman’s Booklist review:

Christensen’s arch and gratifying novel (think Margaret Drabble) pairs the ridiculous with the sublime, and reminds us that nothing human is simply black or white. 

The runners-up:

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees (HarperCollins)

David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury)

T. M. McNally, The Gateway: Stories (Southern Methodist)

Ron Rash, Chemistry and Other Stories (Picador)

I wasn’t not blogging yesterday because I was too busy reading the endless takes and updates on false memories, but that could easily have been the case. Whew.

Motoko Rich places Peggy Seltzer aka Margaret B. Jones as merely the latest in a long line of literary liars (”A Family Tree of Literary Fakers,” New York Times):

But the history of literary fakers stretches far, far back, at least to the 19th century, when a slave narrative published in 1863 by Archy Moore was revealed as a novel written by a white historian, Richard Hildreth, and into the early 20th, when Joan Lowell wrote a popular autobiography, "Cradle of the Deep," about her colorful childhood aboard a four-masted ship sailing the South Seas; in fact, she had grown up almost entirely in Berkeley, Calif.

Daniel Mendelsohn (The Lost, 2006) worries that, because of liars like Misha Defonseca, people won’t believe the holocaust stories that are equally amazing–but true (”Stolen Suffering,” NYT):

That pervasive blurriness, the casualness about reality that results when you can turn off entire worlds simply by unsubscribing, changing a screen name, or closing your laptop, is what ups the cultural ante just now. It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before; what’s worrisome is that, maybe for the first time, the question people are raising isn’t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it’s true.

Simon Dumenco asks a questions that a lot of people have asked lately, “How Did a Valley Girl Convince Times She Was a Ghetto Chick?“–but provides a different answer (Advertising Age):

There are people who are looking to extract object lessons from the “Love and Consequences” (ironic title!) fraud — about how publishers of both books and newspapers must do a better job of checking facts. Fine; that’s all very well and good. But I also believe that Seltzer and Albert are depraved and cunning megalomaniacs who sought a truly perverse sort of glory and reward through wannabe victimhood and self-debasement (”Hug me, I was raped as a child!”), which is, of course, sick. Crime can be reduced through better policing, sure, but it can never be eliminated because mental illness can never be eliminated.

David Treuer asks, “Why do writers pretend to be Indians?” (”Going Native,” Slate):

It’s easy enough to imagine what motivates literary fakers - their inventions are a way to win attention and acclaim for work that would otherwise be dismissed as pedestrian. But why pretend to be an Indian? What is so appealing about stripping off one’s own identity and donning a reddish one?

Louis Bayard (How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, 2007) fact-checks some classics (”Attention, all you memoir fabulists!” Salon):

“The Adventures of Buffalo Bill Cody”

According to zoologists, the animals that Mr. Cody killed in excessive numbers are not buffaloes but bison. We recommend a global search-and-replace, up to and including author’s name.

Galleycat offers feedback from a book reviewer…

“I’m a critic who was assigned to review Love and Consequences,” says a reader who chose to email me anonymously for fairly obvious reasons. “I had my doubts about the book, but they were smoothed over by the requisite note that names had been changed, experiences conflated, etc… I ignored my instincts, though, because I don’t think it’s a critic’s job to vet memoirs, and the story was compelling and well-written.”

…and notes that others were willing to make Riverhead’s mistake:

Which is exactly what Riverhead did when they discovered Peggy Seltzer’s deceptions, too. Yes, I think McGrath should have asked tougher questions. But the problem with Love and Consequences didn’t come about because she’s an anomaly in her field - in fact, she delivered exactly what publishers want. If another house had come up with more money for Emily Davies or “Margaret B. Jones,” this weeklong celebration of schadenfraude (the joy of exposing somebody else’s phoniness, according to author Elizabeth Hand) would have some other editor in the spotlight, no doubt giving exactly the same responses.

Amy Alexander consults the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (”Truth and Consequences,” The Nation):

 I wanted to see if Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, the 33-year-old author of Love and Consequences, fits the description of someone with “anti-social personality disorder,” more commonly known as a sociopath.

Motoko Rich questions not the foundations of Seltzer’s story, but the foundation in her story (”Foundation Is Questioned after Memoir Is Exposed,” NYT):

The author who confessed this week to making up her memoir, "Love and Consequences," about growing up as a foster child in gang-ridden South-Central Los Angeles, appears also to have made up a foundation that she claimed was helping "to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens."

And Steve Huff uncovers a primary source–Seltzer’s dry run (”Seltzer Honed Homegirl Hosejob on AOL,” Radar):

By the time Seltzer set about hoodwinking her editor at Riverhead, Sarah McGrath, she’d already practiced her story on an AOL journal titled “berious b”, which appears to have been created four years ago. “Berious b” was “jus some basik thoughts and perspectives, bree style without apology.” There weren’t many entries, but what Bree - screen name “blastedagronaut” - did post was interesting. Like her “All About Me” section on the right side of the page, which began “im jus a gurl…a simple one at that. i was a soldier once, but i think i am semi-retired now. dont doubt that i am doing my work still, only what that work is has changed…”

And, on Slate, which clearly wants to own this story, Christopher Beam offers “The Fake Memoirist’s Survival Guide“):

Specificity is your enemy. Write with passionate vagueness. Avoid precise dates; don’t get more exact than the year if you can help it. Better yet, the decade. One scholar challenged the authenticity of Misha Defonseca’s memoir based on her claim that her family was deported from Belgium in 1941 - in reality, the Germans didn’t deport Belgian Jews until 1942. Frey was undone when the Smoking Gun discovered he had spent only a few hours in jail, not three months. When in doubt, go with “awhile.”

Also on Slate, Ben Yagoda says the system is working (”Believe It or Not“):

But is it such a terrible thing that so many lying memoirists have been exposed? On the contrary: It’s evidence that the system works.

Also on Slate, Gabriel Sherman updates the Ishmael Beah brouhaha (”The Fog of Memoir“):

Just how did this whole brouhaha start in the first place?

And, FINALLY, on Slate V, a “sneak peek at Volume 2 of Margaret B. Jones’ memoirs.”

The National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced.

Criticism

The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross (Farrar)

Poetry

Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)

Biography

Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, by Tim Jeal (Yale)

General Nonfiction

Medical Apartheid, by Harriet Washington (Doubleday)

Autobiography

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)

Fiction

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: Emilie Buchwald
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Sam Anderson

The Margaret Seltzer story (ably updated at Galleycat) got me to thinking about Laura Albert (aka JT Leroy). Where is she now?

To explain how she’s wound up where she has, Laura first whips out the platitudes, about taking problems of the soul and turning them into art; about following in a distinguished line of writers using pseudonyms; about being not “a poster child for the First Amendment [but a] poster 40-year-old woman!” That she delivers these with brio and the occasional accent does not prevent them from sounding as though they came out of a can. Truer is her contention that our misunderstanding of her motivations has led to her eroding circumstances, a hard thing to deny when you see how she lives: in a cluttered apartment, with her 10-year-old son, a German roommate, Uwe, and a hundred bottles of vitamins and prescription medicines lined up on a cheap wooden bookcase. Laura, to look at, is not a healthy person. She wears a wig, her fingers are gray, and she’s had what some might call excessive elective surgery - on her breasts, her nose, and her lips, which this afternoon show the pricks and puffiness of recent injections.

Oh. Nancy Rommelmann’s loooong, fine profile of Albert in L.A. Weekly (”The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, a.k.a. JT Leroy“) offers some substantive food for thought about why we want to believe things that we suspect aren’t true.

JT had a similar effect on people. Gus Van Sant, who at one point owned the option to Sarah and who gave JT an associate-producer credit on the 2003 film Elephant, last year told Butt magazine, “JT was a superclose friend. There was one year where I would talk to him three hours a day … He became one of my anchors, and then all of a sudden, the anchor wasn’t there … And then, when I ended up meeting Laura, she was what I imagined Sarah to be like, kind of demonic and odd.” Van Sant still finds the character “enchanting … and I think I could still talk to JT, because I think he still exists.”