Posted 25 June, 2007 in Jottings |
- A jury has decided that Laura Albert, who wrote under the name JT Leroy and created a fictional back story for this nonexistent author, is guilty of fraud. Fine, I suppose; she didn’t just write under a nom de plume, she actively promoted “JT Leroy” and his story — teenage runaway street prostitute with AIDS — as authentic, and duped a number of people, including Winona Ryder, Gus Van Sant, and Mary Gaitskill, into believing that Leroy was a real person. What I don’t understand is how Antidote International Films, Inc. can sue to recoup the royalty payments on Leroy’s novel Sarah, which it optioned before the truth about the book’s authorship came to light. True, the novel was promoted as being semi-autobiographical, which is a problem if the autobiography of the author is a complete fabrication. However, Albert is not James Frey: she never tried to pass the book off as anything other than a novel. And the novel still remains. Antidote should not be able to demand royalty payments back simply because the book turned out to be written pseudonymously.
- Penguin is planning to serialize parts of Michael Winter’s new novel, The Architects Are Here, on Facebook. Again, fine, except they’re claiming that it’s the first Facebook serialization of a novel ever, which, love the folks at Penguin though I do, is plain wrong. Brad Kelln, who has published psychological thrillers with Insomniac Press and is now under contract with ECW, has been serializing a new novel on the popular social networking site for the past few months. (If you’re on Facebook, you can find his novel under the group “I am aware Dr. Brad Kelln writes books.”)
- Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless is reviewed in the Guardian. Joanna Briscoe says that the book, about a pedophile, is “more reminiscent of Stephen King than of Nabokov” and that “[t]here’s a strange sense here that Gowdy has both held back and stepped too far.” I still haven’t got around to this one, but I’m glad to see Gowdy getting exposure internationally.
- Edward Gorey was a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now why doesn’t that come as a surprise? (via Maud.)
- Moonlight Ambulette on pairing art books and music.
- Courtney Solomon sounds like one sick puppy.
- Zachariah Wells on unsolicited submissions to literary journals: “Picked up Books in Canada today. In it, an essay by John Barton called “Where Have All the Poets Gone?”, lamenting the small number of poetry submissions he gets at The Malahat Review. He seems dismayed and a little puzzled by the whole thing. Which makes me think of a farmer who, after years of planting potatoes in the spring and ploughing in the fall, wonders why his once-rich field now yields such a paltry crop.”
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