She points to Augusten Burroughs, whose memoir, “Running with Scissors,” has been subjected to particularly intense scrutiny following a string of allegations. “It’s a constant rehashing,” says Crispin. “Now, when people think of memoir, they begin to associate it with lying.”

David Sedaris, who estimates the truthiness, or realishness, of his forthcoming When You Are Engulfed in Flames at “97 percent,” thinks we’re not seeing things in correct proportion:

“What’s interesting to me,” he says, “is that we live in a time when our government is telling us some pretty profound lies. And then James Frey writes a book and it turns out some of it’s not true. No one asked for their vote back, but everyone wanted back the money they’d spent on that book. We’re in the shadow of huge lies and getting angry about the small ones.”

Speak for yourself, Sedaris. I’m mad as hell about the huge lies, and only somewhat angry about the small ones. And while keeping a sense of proportion is important, isn’t it important that everyone tell the truth, politicians and authors alike? And if fudging some facts is important to achieve a larger truth, fine: just tell us you’re doing it.*

*This option not available to politicians.

Audubon’s Elephant, by Duff Hart-Davis (2004)
Caesar’s Column, by Ignatius Donnelly and Walter Rideout (1960)
Cleopatra’s Nose, by Daniel J. Boorstin (1994)
Cleopatra’s Nose, by Judith Thurman (2007)
Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis De Bernieres (1994)
D’Alembert’s Principle, by Andrew Crumey (1998)
Darconville’s Cat, by Alexander Theroux’s (1981)
Darwin’s Wink, by Alison Anderson (2004)
Descartes’ Error, by Antonio Damaso (1994) 
Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes (1984)
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco (1989)
Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel (1999)
Galileo’s Finger, by Peter Atkins (2003)
Galileo’s Mistake, by Wade Rowland (2003)
Galileo’s Pendulum, by Roger G. Newton (2004)
Galileo’s Treasure Box, by Catherine Brighton (1987)
Kafka’s Prayer, by Paul Goodman (1947)
Prospero’s Daughter, by Elizabeth Nunez (2006)
Prospero’s Daughters, by Sally Stewart (2006)
Pushkin’s Button, by Serena Vitale (1999)
Rembrandt’s Eyes, by Simon Schama (1999)
Rembrandt’s Nose, by Michael Taylor (2007)
Schopenhauer’s Porcupines, by Deborah Anna Luepnitz (2002)
Schopenhauer’s Telescope, by Gerard Donovan (2003)
Stalin’s Nose, by Rory MacLean (1993)
Wittgenstein’s Poker, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (2001)

There is, of course, an impressive Shakespearean subset:

Shakespeare’s Counselor, by Charlaine Harris (2001)
Shakespeare’s Daughter, by Peter W. Hassinger (2004)
Shakespeare’s Kitchen, by Lore Segal (2007)
Shakespeare’s Scribe, by Gary Blackwood (2000)
Shakespeare’s Spy, by Gary Blackwood (2003)

The question is, are there enough of these to create an A-Z? And should the rules restrict qualification to actual historical figures, or can we include titles like Alexander Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat (1981)?

These are just off the top of my head–there must be many more. Help me out!

Update #1: Bill Ott pointed me to his February 15, 2004 Back Page (”Working Titles“), which includes some good ones, especially a bunch of Galileos. Also, amazingly, his forthcoming column, in the May 15 issue, debunks the notion that we ever considered changing the name Booklist to Galileo’s Reviews.

Update #2: Donna Seaman offered a sweet-smelling quartet of books with “nose” in the title, including two Cleopatras.

Update #3: Sue-Ellen Beauregard suggested Prospero’s Daughter, and when I searched it, I found that Prospero had not one but two.

Update #4: More, more, more . . . good tips from Mary Ellen Quinn (Corelli), Ray Olson (Caesar, D’Alembert, Kafka), and Donna (Descartes).

Metafiction: the hot new trend in crime fiction!

Sir Salman Rushdie has confessed how he emerged a better person after being under a fatwa that saw him live a life in virtual seclusion for almost a decade.

In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued the author with a death warrant over alleged blasphemy against the Prophet Mohamed in his novel The Satanic Verses. In a revelatory encounter with clinical psychologist Pamela Connolly, to be shown on Channel 4 later this month, the author claims the decision ultimately helped him become more self-aware.

What was it that Churchill said about a “blessing in disguise”? That it’s “very effectively disguised”? Do I have that right?

*Before you tell me that term is out of fashion, let me just say that the show is called Shrink Rap.

“We used to say, growing up, ‘I’m not from America, I’m from South Central L.A.’”

Ouch!

(Via.)

I also thought, however, as I have with other fraudsters, that I can kind of see how the whole making-things-up business could slip out of control. When you’re desperate to get published, it’s probably easy to see agents, publishers, publicists, etc. as experts whose wisdom should be obeyed. And if you’ve never been in the public eye, it’s probably hard to imagine how a few fabrications will come back to haunt you.

That said, Frey still has to take responsibility for what happened. I’m not one to suggest that memoirs should be fact-checked as a rule, but when authors claim pasts for themselves that carry a certain moral weight–say, as ex-convicts, gang members, holocaust survivors–then the publishers should verify their claims. A memoir of a life in publishing doesn’t necessarily require the same treatment.

Remember, the easiest solution is still to publish them as fiction. Or humor. Or at least with a suitably broad, large-print disclaimer.

Peretz’s piece does a nice job of tracking Frey’s own attitude toward and claims about his book’s veracity. But the guy with the “ftbsitttd” tattoo still seems unrepentant:

“The enduring myth of the American memoir as a precise form is bullshit and needed to go away,” he says. “Although the experience was a nightmare, if I started the process of ending that myth, I’m perfectly fine with it. I’ve said all along that I never wanted my books published as memoirs.”

If he never wanted his books to be published as memoirs, why does he care about the memoir form? I guess he developed an interest along the way.

He may be coming back, but he won’t, apparently, be coming back to Chicago.

Best Novel

Down River, by John Hart (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best First Novel By An American Author

In the Woods, by Tana French (Viking)

Best Paperback Original

Queenpin, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)

Best Critical/Biographical

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (Penguin)

Best Fact Crime

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi (Norton)

Best Short Story

“The Golden Gopher,” Los Angeles Noir, by Susan Straight (Akashic)

Best Young Adult

Rat Life, by Tedd Arnold (Dial/Sleuth)

Best Juvenile

The Night Tourist, by Katherine Marsh (Hyperion)

Best Play

Panic, by Joseph Goodrich (International Mystery Writers’ Festival)

Best Television Episode Teleplay

“Pilot,” Burn Notice, by Matt Nix (USA Network/Fox Television Studios)

Best Motion Picture Screen Play

Michael Clayton, by Tony Gilroy (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Robert L. Fish Memorial Award

“The Catch,” from Still Waters, by Mark Ammons (Level Best)

Authors are often short of money, but really.

And Mark Sarvas? No offense to the always interesting Elegant Variation blogger, but he doesn’t seem like enough of a “name” to serve as the lynchpin for a con. Although I guess you might assume he needs money more than Ray Bradbury does. And Skylight Books manager Karen Slattery seems to like him:

“There is this sense that bookstores have this special relationship with authors, that they help them out. And if it had really been Mark Sarvas I definitely would have done it.”

In that review, Ms. Kakutani wrote: “there is something oddly preening about [Franzen’s] self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable.” Also: “Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about [Franzen’s unhappy marriage] or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery.”

In related news, another feuding writer-reviewer duo, Rick Moody and Dale Peck, have reconciled. Peck, you may recall, famously called Moody “the worst writer of his generation.” And there’s video, too.

On Galleycat, Emily Gould asks whether they’re being sincere:

This is cute and all, but there’s a chummy, clubby aspect of the ‘reconciliation’ that bothers me. Does Peck really take back everything he ever said about, say,’The Black Veil?’ Does he still care fervently about literature and how it’s marketed, or is he just spending his free time swimming around in a vault full of money a la Scrooge McDuck now that his sci-fi project with the dude from Heroes sold for $3 million?

Hey, if a cream pie doesn’t demonstrate sincerity, I don’t know what does!

The New York Times reports that Gary Snyder (Back on the Fire, 2007) has won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

What’s going on here? Was this some kind of an inside job, a no-bid contract? Well, yes. But I was as surprised as anyone at the way it came about.

What happened was this: on a gray morning in early February, as I was coming up out of the subway, I had an idea that almost made me laugh out loud. I had been reading a lot of crime fiction–well, I always read a lot of crime fiction–but I thought, “What if I took the conventions of a hard-boiled novel and applied them to something really unlikely like . . . oh, say, book reviewing?”

I banged out a draft almost in one sitting, using fictionalized versions of myself and my colleagues as characters, not even thinking about what I would do with the story when it was finished. I was just writing for fun, which, when you usually write with a more specific end in mind, is . . . well, fun.

I made myself laugh several times. Sometimes that’s a danger sign, but I showed the story to a few people and they thought it was funny, too. I showed it to Bill Ott and he liked it. I started thinking that maybe I should try to publish it. But where? It seemed a little offbeat and “inside” for the mystery magazines, and maybe a little too jokey for the literary magazines.

Bill suggested that I send it to Otto Penzler for an opinion. I’ve never met the man, but he was kind enough to reply within a couple of days. You’re a pretty funny guy, he wrote back. Will it be published? Maybe in BOOKLIST?

I told him that a 5,000-word short story would wreak havoc with our page budget. And, I was thinking to myself, Booklist doesn’t publish fiction–we only review it. But it was a nice thought. After all, who would get the jokes as well as Booklist’s readers?

I forwarded Otto’s e-mail to Bill. A few minutes later, Bill was in my office with an encouraging look on his face.

“How long is your story?” he asked.

I told him.

He winced. Clearly we weren’t going to sacrifice 28 book reviews for my story, no matter how funny we all thought it was. But then he had another idea: what if we started it in the magazine and finished it online?

What if, indeed.

I hope you’ll read it, and I hope you’ll like it. I’m honored to have written the first fiction in Booklist’s storied history, and I’m indebted to both Bill and Otto–and my coworkers, many of them named in the story–for their enthusiasm.

And as you read, bear in mind that this peek at the Booklist offices is entirely fictional.

Well, almost entirely.

Novel

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

Novella

“Fountain of Age,” by Nancy Kress

Novelette

“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” by Ted Chiang

Short Story

“Always,” by Karen Joy Fowler

Script

Pan’s Labyrinth, by Guillermo del Toro

Gee willikers! Check out this swell 1950s-style educational film that gives you the A-B-Cs of having a jim-dandy time at Annual Conference. It’s packed with so many super tips that every Billy and Sue out there will exclaim, “Golly! Can we watch it again?” Yes indeedy, you can! (Stick around afterwards for a few bloopers, too.)

The problem, it turns out, is with the attribution of a little-known document Le Journal Secret de Louis XIV. Little known because it was in fact “reconstructed from historical sources” by a mischievous French scholar in 1998.

Prolific University of Florida professor James Twitchell (Branded Nation, 2004; Living It Up, 2002) has admitted to plenty of plagiarism, according to the Gainesville Sun (”UF professor Twitchell admits he plagiarized in several of his books,” by Jack Stripling):

Twitchell initially denied a pattern of plagiarism, but the 64-year-old professor was contrite and ashamed when recently confronted with a larger body of evidence.

“It’s my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this,” Twitchell wrote in an e-mail Wednesday. “I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others.”

(Via Galleycat.)

And I don’t know why, but this last item seems to fit on this page, too. The hype for James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning is growing (”He’s Back: James Frey Mixes Fact and Fiction, This Time with Art,” by Kate Taylor, The New York Sun), and there’s going to be an expensive art-book companion to the novel, called Wives, Wheels, Weapons. Which makes sense, because he’s not just a writer, he’s an artist.

“Despite the fact that he writes books, he’s much more a part of the art world than the literary world,” Mr. Frey’s friend John McWhinnie said of him.  

And:

The sections about L.A. history and culture in “Bright Shiny Morning” are “sprinkled with facts that may or may not be accurate,” Mr. McWhinnie said. “The book opens with a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer that nothing in it can be considered true,” he continued. Mr. Frey intentionally mixed true and made-up “facts” — mixing real names of gang members with fake ones, for instance — in order to highlight both the factitiousness of L.A. culture and the ironies in his own authorial past.

Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, the book tour will avoid bookstores and focus on rock clubs, with heavy metal, light shows, and projected images supporting the author. I guess that way, if there are hecklers, it will be much harder to hear them.

Wonder if anyone will shout “Frey Bird!”?