The NYT's Motoko Rich helpfully rounds up all the offenders in the fake-memoir trend. Valley Girl gang-pretender Margaret Seltzer, James Frey, and Laura Albert (aka JT Leroy) are only the tip of the iceberg: "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..." Meanwhile, Slate wonders, in reponse to Seltzer's claim to be part Native American, "Why do writers pretend to be Indians?" Apparently this, too, is a trend. In related news, As well, the gang-violence-reduction foundation that Seltzer claimed to have founded, called Brother/SisterHood, is now thought to be fake.

Okay, maybe it was wrong to imply that dating a blogger was useful for an ambitious novelist with a book to market. Literary hearthrob Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and editor of n+1 magazine, was to have featured prominently in an upcoming feature on Russian-American writers. But that was before editors at super-hip Russia! magazine discovered that the article's author, Gawker alumus Emily Gould, was romantically involved with her subject. Reports a spy: "One funny side effect of yesterday's item about the Gould-Gessen romance: RUSSIA! mag, where Gould has a big feature on "young Russian-American writers" in the next issue (closing this week), is furiously scrubbing the story of all mentions of Keith Gessen. Which were, of course, numerous, laudatory and unencumbered with disclaimers." After the jump, a passage from the draft.

As someone who spends about 30 hours a week in the Brooklyn Public Library, I can say this: post-puberty, libraries are a weird scene. At the BK PL, I'm surrounded by the semi-homeless, the pseudo-studious and the fully religious. But over in England, it's a different situation. The British culture minister Margaret Hodge wants to make libraries hip places by putting in coffee bars and renting space at malls. Stuffy Brits who don't want to defile the respectability of their precious book temples just can't understand why public libraries are less popular than they were at their peak 1980. Um, it's called the internet, and it's destroying publishing. [Times of London]

Riverhead Books editor Sarah McGrath, who shepherded the fake memoir from Margaret Seltzer (left), bought a spectacularly inaccurate memoir once before. In 2006, Scribner canceled McGrath's reported $900,000 deal to buy a memoir from fashion reporter Emily Davies. Women's Wear Daily had publicly fact-checked Davies' 79-page proposal and raised many questions, including about an alleged dinner with Donna Karan, a supposed party with Jennifer Lopez and a dubious meeting involving three industry players. It also found a quote had been lifted from a 1998 Times article. And those weren't the only strikes against Davies — she had been in two prior scandals.

"Her senior farewell in the 1992 Campbell Hall yearbook reads, 'To my family — I love you all so much, thank you for everything.' Meanwhile, her high school friends call her 'Pegatha,' their 'Skittle supplier' whose hardest drug consumed was 'vanilla coffee for finals.'" [P6]

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizing is already set to be 2008's Gladwellian The Long Tailing Point Web 2.0 trend book of the year (especially after every blogger in Manhattan went to its release party). Former Gawker Mascot Andrew Krucoff is totally in the book! Because he was an early adopter of phone-based OG social networking gizmo Dodgeball, you see. Everyone else in the New York media scene signed up for it too, but only to write about it. The Krucoff excerpt, via noted music blog Young Manhattanite, is below, accompanied by a comment from mysterious YM contributer 99 that saves us the trouble of making fun of it.

Before she was exposed as a well-off suburban girl rather than a hardscrabble gangster, lying memoirist Margaret Seltzer claimed to have set up a "foundation" called International Brother/SisterHood, either to support her backstory, preemptively redeem herself or maybe just somehow swindle more money. (Thanks to commenter Sigerson for spotting the site and Hamud for taking an early crack at it.) The foundation's website appears to have been registered in the name of Seltzer's agent, Faye Bender, and claims the foundation does pretty much whatever you need, from gangland peace negotiations to anti-gang education to mentoring. "Although we were Bloods, we hold no grudges against CRIPS," the site reads. The most outlandish part is easily the biography of Seltzer's alleged "OG" mentor in the Bloods street gang, Madd Ronald, who the site said also goes by the name "Ronald Chatman."

"Whenever a case like this comes to light, someone asks: Why don't publishers fact-check their books? The basic answer is that it's not practical. Publishers release hundreds of books each year, most of them several hundred pages long. A publisher simply can't afford to fact-check all of those books to the standards of, say, the New Yorker, where a fact checker essentially re-reports each story." [NY Sun]

NPR radio show Tell Me More was all set to air its interview with the author of the memoir Love and Consequences today, but then producers picked up this morning's Times and realized that might not be such a great idea. So they put in a phone call or email or something to the author, Margaret Seltzer, and are eagerly waiting to hear back. In the (likely eternal) meantime, they posted a very brief excerpt of their interview with Seltzer (pen name Margaret Jones), featured after the jump. Also after the jump: Some choice moments from Seltzer's interview with another radio show, WBUR's On Point, in which Seltzer sounds like she's scrambling to keep her lies hidden.

The Times just posted a fascinating follow-up article on the saga of fake memoirist Magaret Seltzer, the well-off white lady who pretended to be a half-Native American gangbanger raised by a foster parent in the ghetto. In it, we learn that none of the editors or publishers involved in the publication of Seltzer's book or subsequent articles about it feels particularly badly about not detecting Seltzer's lies, because the author lied like a crazy person, enlisted a couple of fake foster siblings and it's not like anyone saw this coming. "The one thing we wish," Riverhead Books publisher Geoffrey Kloske told the Times, "is that the author had told us the truth." Kloske's people, along with the Times itself, were suspicious enough that they did some fact checking, but couldn't manage more than the sad and weak sort of fact checking sadly lacking in primary sources. Here, for example, is how Penguin Group editor Sarah McGrath plumbed the depths of Seltzer's background, or, uh, didn't:

Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers is a demanding critic—not even Evelyn Waugh's brilliant The Loved One impressed her enough to receive that fifth star in her Facebook book ratings—so her three-out-of-five stars to travel writer Lawrence Osborne's The Naked Tourist are no surprise. Except that travel writer Lawrence Osborne is her boyfriend. Maybe Spiers just knocked off those two stars as punishment for Osborne taking her to Brazil on the world's worst airline? (And They All Die in the End, Spiers' first novel, is due this summer.) UPDATE/CORRECTION: Spiers comments, below.

Before her publisher Penguin Group realized she was a liar and recalled her memoir, Margaret Seltzer gave an interview on Penguin's website and, probably, in press kits distributed to book reviewers. The interview is chock-full of quotes from Seltzer about her life as an impoverished gang banger raised in a Los Angeles ghetto by a foster parent called "Big Mom." The statements of course look absurd and hilarious, since everyone now knows Seltzer was raised by her biological parents in a nice suburb, where she attended private school and was not a member of a gang at all. Go read Seltzer's lies, issued under her pen name "Margaret Jones," while they are still up on Penguin's website, or just take in highlights, after the jump.

Before being exposed as a fabrication, Margaret Seltzer's memoir "Love and Consequences" received quite a bit of flattering notice in the Times. Michiko Kakutani wrote a glowing review praising, among other things, Seltzer's "amazing job" at recreating the South Central neighborhood where it turned out she had never lived. Seltzer was also the subject, improbably, of a friendly "Home & Garden" section profile, which consisted mainly of Seltzer telling fabricated stories about her life and lounging around "a four-bedroom 1940s bungalow" whose interior is described in the profile in random asides — a "soft black vinyl chair" here, a "small art table" there. All the more interesting, then, that Seltzer's book was shepherded into print over the course of three years by Penguin Group editor Sarah McGrath, whose father is an active writer for the Times and was, for eight years starting in 1995, the editor of the New York Times Book Review.

Meet Margaret Seltzer, pen name Margaret Jones, who until this week was a half-white, half-Indian gangland drug runner who grew up a foster child in predominately black South Central Los Angeles. Her memoir was hailed as a "raw... remarkable book" in the Times, won her tentative online admirers and became the 28th best selling memoir on Amazon after it was released Friday. Of course Seltzer basically made her whole "memoir" up, being entirely white, having grown up in the predominately white San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, having gone to a fancy private school and having been raised by her biological family. Her book tour was supposed to start today in Eugene, Oregon but her publisher, a division of Penguin Group, has canceled all that and recalled her books. How did she get caught? Her lies worked too well:

Hillary Clinton is never, ever, ever going to stop campaigning. If she wins Ohio and Texas, she will obviously soldier on. If she wins Ohio but not Texas, she will slightly less obviously soldier on. If she wins neither, she will probably still soldier on. Meanwhile she's getting all punchy in her speeches, she's thrilled that everyone is making fun of her 3 a.m. phone ad, and she's getting friendly with the press again. Even the members of the press who have written or are in the process of writing embarrassing books about her! According to the New York Times, Hillary even pretended to be happy to see Gail Sheehy, a woman who has made Senator Clinton's public life miserable almost since she entered public life.

For lit geeks, the greatest scandal of our time continues. Dmitiri Nabokov has still not decided what to do with Laura, his father's final novel which he asked be destroyed. D. Nab is an unenviable position. On one hand, Lolita was so awesome that this book probably has some literary merit. On the other hand, taking away a dead man's final wishes is completely fucked. Isn't death enough of a punishment? But now, Dmitri speaks!

Charla Krupp recently published How Not to Look Old, which was mentioned in Time magazine's article, "How Not to Look Old on the Job." They didn't mention she was married to Richard Zoglin, says Portfolio. But some say this is not a big deal?

More winners and losers from the writers strike! Winner: actor Rob Lowe, who proposed and sold his memoirs during the strike. Loser: Jonathan Karp, the Hachett publisher who placed the winning bid on them. Good thing the $1 mil didn't change hands, because once the strike was over, old Rob-O went back to work and no longer has the time to write the damn thing. For a moment during the strike, you could almost think otherwise, but the fact remains: most people would abandon books in a heartbeat for Hollywood. [NY Observer]

There's a new book about blogs that the blogs can't stop talking about because bloggers love books about them. But actually reading a book about blogs? Nothing could be more boring. But there are nuggets in Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web that make reading it, or the reviews of it at least, worthwhile. For one: In Eurotrash Geraldine Hayward takes bad breath to new literary heights describing her former (possibly famous!) boss.

There's a war going on about proper bookshelf etiquette! Most people buy books (still), read them, and put them on a "shelf" for storage when they're done, writes Matt Selman in his Time blog. WRONG! If you're doing that, you're already way behind the cultural curve, Ezra Klein says in The American Prospect: "Bookshelves are not for displaying books you've read; those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be." What does this learn us? That "bookshelves are a medium of social interaction... a format for the "performance of self," Inside Higher Ed concludes. Oh.