The first review that the New York Times wrote of fabricating memoirist James Frey's new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, was gushy to the point that it was written in the style of his novel. (It ran in the Arts section and was written by Janet Maslin.) But the NYT's Book Review takes it on this week—this time, the results are the literary equivalent of dropping a piano on an author's head. "Stupefying" and "Wikipedian" are some of the kinder words issued. At one point, it is actually suggested that maybe Frey is being bad on purpose.

"James Frey might be a surprising choice, but I liked A Million Little Pieces." [Post]

Not that James Frey. Some other guy named James Frey. Still: name curse? [NYP]

Things are looking up for publisher Nan Talese: A couple of weeks after James Frey shifted more of the blame for the Million Little Pieces brouhaha onto her namesake imprint, Leon Neyfakh reports that authors including Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer may be joining her list, following their previous editor Janet Silver's new role as Talese's editor-at-large. [Observer]

Fabricating memoirist James Frey earned a $1.5 million advance for his novel Bright Shiny Morning, and sales are strong. Now Frey is paying forward his riches from the book, and the money seems to be making a circle back toward the people who staged his comeback in the first place. Frey, the Post reported today, hired his wife's friend Davidson Goldin, former editorial director at MSNBC, to help with publicity on Bright Shiny Morning. Now flush, it would seem, with surplus cash, Goldin is starting a "media-strategy and branding consulting firm." And who did Frey steer to Goldin as a partner in this endeavor? Joe Dolce, the former Star magazine editor-in-chief famous for his poor management and communication skills. But there's a very relevant detail about Dolce and his relationship to Frey the Post omitted:

Good news for fabricating memoirist James Frey and his once-embattled publisher: His first novel, Bright Shiny Morning, just debuted at number 9 on the Times bestseller list, with 14,000 copies sold. "We hear HarperCollins is pleased," reports the Observer's Leon Neyfakh. Among the many, many people not sharing the publisher's glee are certain proud citizens of Los Angeles, who have begun to notice false statements in the book about their city and its history. "New York reviewers adore the book because they think it nails L.A.," wrote LA Observed. But get this: It doesn't! The book is filled with awful, awful LIES!

Now that James Frey is shilling his new novel, a screenwriter who walked the picket line during last fall's strike wrote in to share his experience with Frey, who "showed up to carry a sign and (I suspect) generally be seen. A female writer saw him and truly didn't recognize him at all. Here was the exchange that happened..."

James Frey on his writing style: "I also never really read my own writing, so I try to make it perfect the first time through." [WP]

James Frey-the whining, lying-ass, horrible writer who was probably never seriously addicted to anything in his whole sad, pampered, no-talent life-may have duped The New York Times into giving his new novel a drooling rave. But he received much saner treatment from David L. Ulin at The Los Angeles Times. "'Bright Shiny Morning' is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read [...] Two and a half years after he was eviscerated by Oprah Winfrey for exaggerating many of the incidents in his now-discredited memoir 'A Million Little Pieces,' he's back with this book, which aims to be the big novel about Los Angeles, a panoramic look at the city that seeks to tell us who we are and how we live."

Kevin Kopelson's insanely complete confessional in the London Review of Books is probably going to destroy his academic career, but at least the University of Iowa English professor will have lent some (im)moral support to fellow plagiarists, from fake Harvard novelist Kaavya Viswanathan to Lonely Planet hack Thomas Kohnstamm to college students everywhere. Kopelson seems to take a certain glee in confessing his many acts of intellectual theft. They've been weighing him down for a while: Kopelson's plagiarism started in the fourth grade and continued through college, graduate school and beyond.

The James Frey Super Badass Killer book tour hit the Blender Theater this week, and the sleepy burg called New York is still reeling from the overpowering awesomeness. This tour, you'll recall, is not just some punk ass reading at Borders; no, it's a heavy metal-blasting punch of literary skill right in the face. Fiction writer Frey "walked through his adoring fans flanked by two huge body-builders," then read while hardcore Terry Richardson photos of guns flashed on a screen behind him. Someone asked Frey about writer's block. "Writer's block is for chumps," he replied. Step back, abstract psychological concept! At least Frey is bringing some energy to his book tour, as terrible as they usually are. But where was all that overpowering machismo when he was taping this Barnes & Noble promo earlier this week?:

Doesn't anyone feel just the teensiest bit sorry for James Frey? Personal feelings about his writing and the fact that he interviews like Forrest Gump aside, during the current media blitz surrounding Bright Shiny Morning (the one he told Vanity Fair he wouldn't be doing!), the dude is practically hog-tied at every opportunity and forced to talk about his past sins. The constant rehashing makes for a really boring interview. How many times must a man be forced to apologize? Was F. Scott Fitzgerald right? Are there truly no second acts in American lives?

We haven't read it yet (somebody please send!), but the NYT has totally fallen in love with reformed lying-memoirst James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning, set in Los Angeles. Times critic Janet Maslin writes, "His publisher called it a dazzling tour de force. (Look, somebody had to, if only to create a comeback drama)... But that wasn't so far off the mark..." It's the "captivating urban kaleidoscope that, most recently, Charles Bock's 'Beautiful Children' was supposed to be." And what else?

"James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning is at #666 on Amazon. I just had to tell someone." [Amazon]

James Frey's upcoming novel, Bright Shiny Morning, features interwoven narratives from the city of Los Angeles. One of his characters, a gay Cuban internet-based gossip, is based on—you guessed it, Perez Hilton! Aww. (Although, Frey does write that "between six and eight million people a day come to his website," which seems a little high.) Read the excerpt for trajectory of a young Perez Hilton.

Disgraced fabricating memoirist James Frey is planning to redeem himself in two weeks with a new book, Bright Shiny Morning, clearly labeled as fiction. But there's some spadework to be done first, in terms of publicity and whatnot, and it seems Frey hasn't been too careful about, you know, "the truth" or whatever, in the run-up to his literary rebirth. He granted Vanity Fair an "exclusive" interview and got in return a "softball profile... which paints Mr. Frey as a wounded victim of market forces," in the words of the Observer's Leon Neyfakh. But it turns out Frey also talked to a UK trade publication called The Bookseller, which posted its interview to the Web just a few hours after Vanity Fair. Then there's Frey's worn claim that he first submitted his memoir A Million Little Pieces as a novel but was convinced to relabel it as a memoir. Pieces publisher Nan Talese was not pleased, to say the least, to hear that Frey has resumed saying this:

James Frey is doing just one interview for his new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and it's with Vanity Fair. Writer Evgenia Peretz tries to get to the bottom of what exactly happened with that whole fake-memoir scandal of his last book, which caused him to be ritually flensed on Oprah. "During the publishing process, Frey, it seems, still had some misgivings about putting the book out there as a memoir." Is there usually so much sturm und drang about putting out a memoir? If it's true it's a memoir and if not it's fiction, right? We're sort of tired of debating the mechanics of it at this point, but apparently it's just not that simple.

If just buying James Frey's new novel isn't enough for you, you can purchase the "companion volume" called Wives, Wheels, and Weapons for just $150, hardcover. But it has a bunch of Terry Richardson photos of MILFs, gangsters, and rad cars. The three things that symbolize L.A.! I don't really understand the market for any of this. Particularly for Frey's heavy metal/ Hell's Angels book promotional tour, which gets a prize for Most Apparent Conscious Contrivance Of Coolness:

Fabricating author Ben Mezrich isn't another Margaret Seltzer or James Frey, instead he's part of a far more serious deception. It has emerged that Mezrich invented most of the card-sharking characters in his supposed "real-life" biography, Bringing Down The House, the basis for the hit movie 21. He also appears to have manufactured the bloody beating of a gambler, the smuggling of cash at the airport using hollow crutches, the theft of a safe and the very existence of an MIT instructor. The thing is, his editors knew all about it. But they decided to market his book as a true story, and label it that way on the cover.

When I was at Jossip, I wrote about an anecdote Malcolm Gladwell told at the Moth Gala last November, which was later rebroadcasted on This American Life. In the story, Gladwell boasts about getting absurd phrases like "raises new and troubling questions" and "perverse and often baffling" into the Washington Post. At the time, being self-serious and high-minded &mdash I do after all listen to This American Life &mdash I wondered whether there wasn't something "perverse and often baffling" about one of the most successful journalists of our time making lite deception sound so endearing . Some people agreed with me, or at least wondered how a Canuck like Gladwell ended up on This American Life. Gladwell is back, not to defend himself for the charges of being Canadian, but to explain the story on his own blog: