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On Murderati, Tess Gerritsen asks, “Why the hell won’t they review my book?!!!” and pretty much answers her own question. My visit to the Inquirer was a sobering look at how tough newspapers have it these days, trying to keep up with all they have to cover.  Every author wants attention, but one look at [...]

I know it came out four years ago, but I just recently watched The Hoax, Lasse Hallstrom’s film version of Clifford Irving’s 1981 account of his infamous faking of Howard Hughes’ autobiography. Well, the movie is wonderful. Richard Gere absolutely nails his performance as Irving, playing him as a creative and talented writer whose defective [...]

Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back, a grim reexamination of the first wartime use of the atomic bomb, relies extensively on first-person accounts. Unfortunately, according to the New York Times (“Doubts Raised on Book’s Tale of Atom Bomb,” by William J. Broad), one section of the book relies on the [...]

And what a week it was. All right, fine: weeks. A few miscellaneous links I can’t delete without sharing . . . . The editorial board of the New York Times makes a good point (“Banning Books in Miami“): The Miami-Dade School Board’s decision is not only unconstitutional, it is counterproductive. If the board wants [...]

As Larry Rohrter reports in the New York Times, “A Chilean Writer’s Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past“: At the same time, some of Mr. Bolaño’s friends in Mexico, where he lived for nearly a decade before finally settling down near Barcelona, Spain, are questioning another aspect of the life story he constructed for [...]

Your Herman Rosenblat update, courtesy of Arts Beat: An independent publisher said it had completed an agreement to publish a novel tentatively titled “The Apple,” based on a movie screenplay that was, in turn, adapted from Herman Rosenblat’s falsified Holocaust memoir, “Angel at the Fence.” Got that? Personally, I’m waiting for the video game, which [...]

Tom Tomorrow tackles the memory crisis (“This Modern World,” Salon). A bunch of publishing types speculate on how much money Barack Obama will earn for his memoirs (“How Much Will Obama Get for His Memoirs?” New York). Funny, funny, funny: Larry Kirshbaum, agent and former CEO, Time Warner Books: “With Dow 9,000 as a base, [...]

Oh, for Christmas’ Sake! More false memory: best-selling author Neale Donald Walsch (Tomorrow’s God: Our Greatest Spiritual Challenge) has admitted that he is not the author of a heartwarming Christmas story he posted on Beliefnet.com (“Christmas Essay Was Not His, Author Admits,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times). The real author is Candy Chand, who first published [...]

More catching up. The feel-bad publishing story of the season (or feel-good, if you are prone to schadenfreude) concerns another case of false memoir. Berkeley Books no longer plans to publish Herman Rosenblat’s memoir, Angel at the Fence. Rosenblat now admits that he did not meet his wife, Roma (nee Radzicky) at Buchenwald, but rather [...]

This just in: men and women lie about they read. (Men, naturally, are twice as likely to do so.) But there’s a perfectly good reason for it: reading the right stuff helps you succeed with the opposite sex. (Which is why men . . . never mind.) A survey conducted by England’s National Year of Reading [...]