We are vindicated! The rumors are accurate! Says the Wall Street Journal: "News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers says it will publish [James] Frey's 'Bright Shiny Morning,' a novel set in southern California, in summer 2008 through its Harper imprint." Wow, that's... wow. [WSJ]

We just heard that Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham bought a short story collection from James Frey —yeah, that James Frey—for a million dollars. Can someone tell us whether this is true so we can get on with the killing ourselves/not killing ourselves, whichever turns out to be appropriate?

You know how to tell when you've been working in celebrity journalism too long? When your first impulse after getting fired is to run and hire Marty Singer as your counsel—and today's Page Six suggests that fired TMZ TV producer Bryn Friedman is talking to good old Marty about her potential employment litigation.

Dear Brooklyn: Like a sugared-up 11-year-old, you're always claiming things. Sometimes it's "That dirty Pole touched me in a bad place." Sometimes it's "We invented electroclash and it's good!" A lot of the time your outrageous claims have to do with babies and how great life is and the joys of microbrewing beer. You know: Lies. Over the years we've started to ignore you—which meant when you came to us yodeling about a tornado yesterday, we smiled, nodded and backed away. I guess it's just hard for all of us to tell your "personal" truth, the James Frey kind of truth, from the actual truth sometimes. Maybe you should go back to your "great apartment" and think about that?

Asked about the book during a session at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest on Saturday, [Doubleday publisher Nan A.] Talese said her experience with author James Frey had not changed the way she handled memoirs. 'I'm afraid I'm unapologetic of the whole thing,' she said. 'And the only person who should be apologetic is Oprah Winfrey,' who she says exhibited 'fiercely bad manners — you don't stone someone in public, which is just what she did.'

A scene from the literary life of Lindsay Lohan:

On April 6, lawyers will assemble downtown to approve the settlement of the A Million Little Pieces litigation against Random House and James Frey. Did you buy the book in the U.S.? Are you willing to swear you were misled? Congratulations! You're in the settlement class! But you'll only have until May 15 to get your $23.95 for your hardcovers, and you'll sign away the right to have a beef with Frey ever again. [UPDATE: That's a proposed date—real date to be hashed out later.] Best of all, they've already registered the website, with the sexy URL of AMLPSettlement.com. Come and marvel at the web skills of the legal community!

Well, the o.g. Fake Writer seems to have learned his lesson about lifting whole sentences verbatim. But the latest novel excerpt up on Big Jim's website (by the way, he's lying about the 'Big,' too, obviously) certainly owes a debt to Farm Aiding singer/songwriter/actor John Cougar Mellencamp. See for yourself:

In a Talk of the Town piece in next week's New Yorker (online now), Jeffrey Toobin talks to the man behind the O.J. Simpson not-confession If I Did It, Pablo Fenjves, who got to know Judith Regan when they were colleagues at the National Enquirer in the 1970s. (He wrote "human-interest" stories for the paper.)

We were trolling for pictures of hipsters standing in front of taxidermied animals this morning when we stumbled across an essay that intrigued us in the online version of this month's BlackBook magazine. Some kidder had decided to write an essay about cover photographer Alex Soth, imitating James Frey's signature tics his punctuationless prose and repetitition repetitition repetition for emphasis. Kind of untimely, we thought, but still funny. In fact, when we reached the end of the first sentence we chucked aloud at the parody's broadness:

The Transom reports that, when James Frey overheard a group of acquaintances talking smack about him at Employees Only, he got so incensed that be "broke his highball glass in at least a dozen pieces"[haha]. The intimation that he'd been drinking is nice, sure. But we're still obsessing a little about the item's opening lines:
"Be careful how many times you say "James Frey" in public. He could appear right behind you."
Hold on, we're trying it right now. James Frey James Frey James Frey. Huh, didn't work. Excuse us while we go try it thirteen times in front of the bathroom mirror by candlelight.

Is James Frey The Candyman? [NYO]
Earlier: You're Going to Love The Way You Look — He Kinda Guarantees It
Update: AIEEEEEEEE!!!

A reader sends us news of our favorite disgraced writer:

Over at his website, Big Jim Industries, disgraced memoirist James Frey posts the first paragraph of his new book Here it is:

The paper chasers over at The Smoking Gun are venturing into the wild world of print with The Dog Dialed 911: A Decade of the World's Most Dogged Investigative Reporting, a book of random and ridiculous documents organized into lists ("4 Early Eminem Hits," "11 Things a Teacher Should Never Say to His Students"). This image appears under the list "1 Sentiment No Longer Held," with the following explanation:

Somehow, in our ADD-inflicted carelessness, we missed this Guardian interview with Fake Writer James Frey; it's the disgraced memoirist's first interview since Oprah gave him a national flogging back in January. Frey says quite a bit but, as it's coming from an admitted liar, it's hard to know what to believe. Rather than ask that you try to parse the interview on your own, we've gone ahead and provided our translation services:

Fake writer James Frey has been slowly reintroducing himself into society, emerging from the Tribeca loft he shares with his wife and daughter to attend a select few chic events hosted by artists or VH1. As part of the progression of returning to some semblance of public life, Frey allowed his wife, Maya, to drag him to the front row of Cynthia Rowley's show last Thursday, where the two were subjected to the rote "who are you wearing?" drill, courtesy of the Observer. Frey himself was decked in Lacoste, Hanes, J. Crew, and Adidas. Modestly attired, more or less (save for his street-cred friendly Tiffany earrings). The cheerful Mrs. Frey, however, was more upscale, sporting Prada and Hermes. Obviously, a marriage fractured by the tension of widespread disgrace and embarrassment isn't anything a generous shopping allowance can't fix.

For the launch of its website on Wednesday, Radar published an exclusive about Fake Writer James Frey: rather than face a potentially pricey class-action lawsuit from Frey's emotionally wounded readers, Random House would offer a refund only to those who have a dated receipt from their original purchase of the book (so they'd probably have to pay off maybe three people, two of whom have been saving receipts since the Depression).

The reemergence of James Frey proceeds apace: Today he pops up in Salon as part of a feature where writers (and Mark Cuban) talk about their dream TV shows. Frey begins thusly:

As mentioned last week, Fake Writer James Frey continues his slow return to the written word by penning a quick piece about his favorite NFL team for our sporty sibling site Deadspin. Frey's writing (which kind of sucks without the tales of excessive vomiting) is hollow; it suggests that he is now but a shell of a man, broken and beaten into monosyllabic timorousness. No doubt Frey carefully choose his words so as to avoid any sort of dramatic embellishment, but we've gone ahead and done some fact-checking. An excerpt from his Deadspin debut, complete with our notes:

It's a special time for Fake Writer James Frey. After admitting to fabricating several parts of his rehab memoir and getting flogged by national ringleader Oprah Winfrey, the faux-memoirist has been laying understandably low: hiding out in Europe, sulking around the East End, and cycling around lower Manhattan with a perma-scowl on his face. But perhaps things are looking up for our anti-hero: New York reported this week that Frey has a piece of (intentional) fiction published in the catalogue for photographer Malerie Marder's fall show at Greenberg Van Doren gallery, and today WWD reveals that BlackBook has commissioned Frey for a considerably more risky article in its November issue, a piece about photographer Alex Soth, who shot Maggie Gyllenhaal for the cover.