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WHEN:
Sat, Jun 25, 2011
8:00 PM-9:00 PM
WHERE:
BookHampton
41 Main Street
East Hampton
DETAILS:
James Frey will read from and sign his new book, “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.”
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Any bookseller bookhampton@bookhampton.com
631 324-4939
NEW YORK, June 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Gagosian Gallery announces the launch of an application for the iPad, available as a free download from the iTunes store, beginning today. The app will be updated four times per year, providing content that features recent, current, and future Gagosian artists, exhibitions, and projects. The artists presented in edition #1 include Richard Avedon, Cecily Brown, John Currin, Vera Lutter, Kazimir Malevich, Elizabeth Peyton, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Prince, and Rudolf Stingel.
Admirers of John Currin’s opulent portraiture will revel in the app’s gigapixel digital expose of a recent painting, as well as a 2010 lecture by the artist. Other projects include an interview with writer James Frey about his 2011 novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, published by Gagosian Gallery. The app also offers excerpts from scholar Aleksandra Shatskikh’s catalogue essay for the historic exhibition “Malevich and the American Legacy” (March 3–April 30, 2011, New York).
Viewers can relive a key moment in art history by watching archival footage of Rauschenberg’s
1966 performance, Open Score; or follow a tour by curator Francesco Bonami of “Rudolf Stingel” (March 4 – April 16, 2011, New York).
These are some of the top items that we are seeing spike in Search on Yahoo!
American Idol: If searches are any indication of a winner this year, Scott McCreery has quite the race ahead of him against Lauren Alaina — Lauren Alaina gets nearly 9 times the searches of Scott McCreery on Yahoo!, based on data from the past 7 days.
Dancing: The finale for Dancing With The Stars is tonight and people are turning to the web to search. According to searches on Yahoo! the top dancer is: Kirstie Alley followed by Chelsea Kane.
Who Is ?: People often turn to the web for answers to their questions. Some of the top “who is” questions this week on Yahoo! include: “who is Hines Ward”, “who is the Schwarzenegger staff member”, “who is james frey”, “who is the girl with the dragon tattoo”, “who is the girl in the t-mobile commercial”, “who is big papa” (referencing Real Housewives of Atlanta), “who is the richest man in the world.”
[ click to read full item at The Daily Buzz ]
from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Oprah the Book Fairy: The Astounding Success of the Oprah Book Club
You can bet publisher’s are going to miss Oprah as much as her viewers when her long-running show wraps up next week. Nielsen has just released an accounting of the impact of Oprah’s Book Club on the sales of the books chosen.
In the last ten years she has sold over 22 million copies of books bearing her Book Club branding.
Her full impact on book sales is hard to quantify but there are some amazing concrete numbers regarding how many books bearing the Oprah Book Club selection imprint have sold. For example, the Oprah trade paperback edition of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey sold 2.7 million copies and her edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road sold 1.4 million copies.
By Megan Clifford, CNN
(CNN) – From “aha!” moments to “teachable” moments, in 25 years “The Oprah Winfrey Show” has not just become a part of our popular vernacular, it’s shaped our culture. Whether you’ve tuned in each weekday afternoon or preferred to tune her out, “Lady O” has left her mark.
Here’s our list of the top five ways “Oprah” has changed the way we live.
Reading
Oprah got people walking, and reading. During the 14 years of Oprah’s Book Club, fans bought millions of copies of Oprah’s 65 selected reading suggestions. A lit pick by Oprah guaranteed additional printings and big paychecks for publishers and authors.
Controversy colored her 2005 choice of James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” when the author was forced to admit he had made up large sections of the story of drug addiction and recovery that he touted as nonfiction.
Nonetheless, it made for great discussions at Oprah-inspired book clubs across the country.
Race relations
Oprah has always credited the sacrifice and service of the men and women involved in the civil rights movement for paving a path for a poor African- American woman from the South to transform into a beloved billionaire businesswoman. In turn, Oprah’s success has inspired millions more.
![[GARDEN3]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-AY269_GARDEN_G_20110511174610.jpg)
Patrick McMullan
Jay-Z (left) appeared as a guest of Kanye West during MoMa’s Party in the Garden.
It’s not easy to outshine Kanye West, but if anyone can do it, it’s Jay-Z.
The Brooklyn-raised rapper appeared as a special guest Tuesday night during Mr. West’s performance at the Museum of Modern Art’s annual Party in the Garden, in front of an already-frenzied crowd that erupted when he joined Mr. West onstage.
But the earlier crowd, nibbling on mini lobster rolls and mini prosciutto BLT sandwiches, did find time for other topics.
Author James Frey said he’s continuing to develop his art collection. “I just bought a couple pictures by my boy Richard Phillips,” said Mr. Frey, pointing to the artist, standing nearby.
Mr. Frey was less inclined to discuss his impending appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show next week— “I really can’t talk about it,” he said. “I signed papers.”—but was eager to mention the HBO drama he’s writing about the pornography industry.
“I interviewed the CEOs of the three biggest companies in the world,” he said. “If we get to shoot everything we’ve come up with,” he said, “it’s going to be amazing.”
by
One of the bigger sing-alongs of Kanye West’s performance at the Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday night came about 20 minutes into his hour-plus set. Dressed in light blue jeans, a gray hoodie and black skytops, West bent into the mic to sing the first four notes of his 2007 single, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.”
Jay-Z and Kanye West
Photo By Nicholas Hunt/PatrickMcMullan.com
“Laaaaa. Laa. La-la,” several hundred party goers chanted right along, “Wait ‘til I get my money right!”
Among those who turned out for the party, sponsored this year by Cartier, were Henry Kravis and Marie-Josée Kravis, Larry Gagosian, Michael Douglas, Jerry Speyer and David Rockefeller. James Frey, standing near one of the garden’s pools, explained that a non-disclosure agreement would keep him from discussing his upcoming interview with Oprah. He talked art instead.
“At MoMA, my favorite [work] to see is the Pollocks,” the author said. “The ferocity of it and the recklessness of it, and the abandon of it and the beauty of it. I wish I could do with words what he did with paint.”
Would he be sticking around for Kanye?
“F–k yeah I am,” Frey said.
A few of Frey’s fellow attendees, including Leelee Sobieski and Richard Phillips, echoed the endorsement of West. As cocktail hour ended, and the garden began to clear, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was chatting among a circle of guests that included Jamie Dimon. On his way into dinner, the mayor talked up the museum.
“This is one of the great jewels in the cultural crown of New York,” he said, surveying his surroundings.
So would he be sticking around for Mr. West?
The mayor paused.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: 1:26 p.m. Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Oprah Winfrey’s interview with author James Frey will stretch over two episodes during the final full week of her talk show.
The shows will air May 16 and 17, more than five years after Winfrey accused Frey on live television of lying in one of his books. During a short promotional clip on Tuesday’s episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” an announcer deemed it “the biggest controversy in Oprah show history.”
Winfrey chose Frey’s substance abuse story “A Million Little Pieces,” for her book club in September 2005, making it a million-seller.
Social Mobile games publisher Glu Mobile has announced a partnership with Full Fathom Five, the publishing company of best-selling author James Frey, for a transmedia collaboration. “We are thrilled to announce this groundbreaking partnership with James and Full Fathom Five,” said Niccolo de Masi, CEO of Glu. “Glu and James Frey have a shared vision for the future of mobile and transmedia digital entertainment…. Properties will begin as novels and games on smartphones and tablets, with potential expansions for the most successful creations into television and film.”
The first of its kind, Glu and Full Fathom Five will create transmedia content that fans can enjoy as both Social Mobile games and as novels. Full Fathom Five has already experienced success in transmedia collaboration with “I Am Number Four”, a #1 New York Times bestseller for 7 weeks, which was produced into a film by Dreamworks and Disney released earlier this year and grossed $128 million worldwide. Mr. Frey has written three other #1 bestsellers and has 10 million books in print. His work is published in 39 languages. “I’m thrilled to be working with Glu, an incredible company that makes incredible games. Partnerships like this one are going to be a big part of the future of storytelling and gaming,” said Frey.
By Eric Alt
OWN
President Barack Obama jokes with Oprah Winfrey just hours after releasing a long-form version of his Hawaiian birth certificate.
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama taped their May 2nd appearance on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” just hours after the President attempted to silence the growing furor over his birth certificate with a national press conference.
Oprah booked the First Couple as part of her march towards the May 25th finale of her long-running daytime talk show. She also recently confirmed that author James Frey, who famously had the veracity of his supposed memoir “A Million Little Pieces” questioned by Oprah a few years back, would be returning to the show during the final weeks.
Naturally, the subject of the President’s recent birth certificate debacle came up during the taping.
Last Updated: 9:29 AM, April 21, 2011
James Frey is either brave or masochistic. He’s agreed to be one of Oprah Winfrey’s final guests on her syndicated show, even though she famously filleted him for fabricating details of his best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” in 2006. The controversial writer — who was so burned by Winfrey’s wrath that he had to flee to France — will face his former nemesis for a full hour next month to promote his novel, “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible,” out tomorrow. A source told us, “Oprah apologized to James a couple of years ago, and he appreciated it. So he agreed to go back on her show and talk about everything that’s happened over the last five years.” Frey is set to ignite another fire storm with his new book, in which the Second Coming of Christ takes place in the Bronx projects — but the messiah turns out to be a former alcoholic who impregnates a prostitute. It’s being published in a limited edition of 10,000 copies by Gagosian Gallery and as an e-book by Frey and WME. Reps for Winfrey didn’t get back to us.
WIREIMAGE
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Review by AN Wilson
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, by James Frey, John Murray, RRP£16.99, 400 pages
Cult American author James Frey’s new novel is both a work of art and a bombshell hurled at the religious right. It tackles the Second Coming of Jesus in modern America – with the promised Messiah enacting the deeds the religious right consider most wicked. He is, for example, an active bisexual who supports his prostitute girlfriend when she aborts her first child.Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant: every page is great. Whether you are religious, or bigotedly irreligious, or neither, you will find it disturbing in the best possible sense, in the way that Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” myth is disturbing.[ click to read full review at FT.com ]
from The Institute of Contemporary Arts
13 April 2011
£12 / £11 concessions / £10 ICA Members
James Frey became a best-selling author on the back of his Oprah-approved memoir A Million Little Pieces. This fame turned to infamy when it was revealed that the book was not entirely based on fact and was followed by a public apology on Oprah’s show. In his new (and fictional) book he presents a story of a man who may be the Messiah or may be the second coming of Christ, written in the manner of the Gospels and told by those around him. His publishers expect feathers to be ruffled, especially in the Christian world which may well see his version of Jesus as blasphemous.
Mark Vernon ex-vicar has the dubious honour of being one of the last people in Britain to be charged with blasphemy for content on his gay and lesbian Christian website. His March Radio 4 series In Doubt We Trust looks at the relationship between religion and doubt and how notions of truth and story telling are understood in this context.
This discussion promises to be a fascinating insight into the process of writing fiction, what fiction really is, what its relationship with truth is and what blasphemy might mean today.
Brett Gundlock / National Post
Does it look like they’re joking? From left: Don McKellar, director Andrew Burashko and Nicholas Campbell restage Orson Welles’ 1938 aliens attack radio drama/elaborate hoax, War of the Worlds.
Mar 30, 2011 – 6:30 PM ET
With April Fool’s Day just around the corner, it’s as good a time as any to remember that we all need a startling jolt every now and then. With that in mind, Ben Kaplan looks at the history of hoaxes.
Pranks in the entertainment world have a long and storied history, but the biggest and best was probably Orson Welles’ aliens attack radio drama, War of the Worlds. “He was pissed off that people believed everything they heard on the radio and said, ‘If they’ll believe everything, I’m going to give them something unbelievable to believe,’ ” says Andrew Burashko, artistic director of Toronto’s Art of Time Ensemble, currently resurrecting a theatrical account of Welles’ 1938 hoax heard around the world.
According to Burashko, Welles was the entertainment world’s original prank provocateur, a tradition that spans from Andy Kaufman to Joaquin Phoenix, who all follow a time-honoured method of keeping audiences on their toes.
Since we’re seeing so much of everyday people in the documentaries of Morgan Spurlock, memoirs by James Frey and reality-TV shows such as American Idol andThe Real Housewives franchise, it makes sense that the art world plays with reality — all the better if it can send a message like Welles did.“
Performance and reality are merging — you see this a lot in modern fiction — and that’s always been interesting, but I think it’s real fruitful right now,” adds McKellar, who is also at work on a new fall sitcom for CBC. “People today are hyper-aware of the conventions of media, and it’s fun to play with them where you can.”
This just in: star graphic designer Rodrigo Corral has been appointed creative director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), according to a statement issued today by president and publisherJonathan Galassi. Corral is no stranger to FSG, having worked in the company’s art department from 1996 to 2000 after graduating from the School of Visual Arts. He begins in his new post early next month and will continue to run Rodrigo Corral Design, the nine-year-old studio behind such memorable book covers as those for James FreyA Million Little Pieces, a shelf of Chuck Palahniuk novels, Debbie Millman‘s smashing How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, and Jay-Z‘s recent memoir-cum-lyrical codex, Decoded, for which Corral dispensed with the glamour shot and featured one of Andy Warhol‘s Rorschach paintings.
James Frey on The Bowery.
The FLAG Art Foundation Presents New Exhibitions: ‘Josephine Meckseper’ and ‘Gerhard Richter, Sinbad’
The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present two new exhibitions: an exhibition of new works by Josephine Meckseper on FLAG’s 9th floor space, and Sinbad, an exhibition of 98 paintings by Gerhard Richter, on the 10th floor. The exhibitions will run from February 23, 2011 through May 26, 2011.
Josephine Meckseper
Josephine Meckseper employs window displays, vitrines, installations, photographs, films and magazines to draw a direct correlation to the way consumer culture defines subjectivity and sublimates the key instruments of individual political agency.
Meckseper presents new works focusing on retail environments and modernist concepts. Industrial reflective slatwalls, a staple of bargain store design, mirror the car dealerships of 11th Avenue. Chromed wheels, car headlights and logos flash across the videos, sculptures and cellophane-wrapped paintings, like detritus after a crash. The traditional allure of the automobile is undercut with its demise, giving the entire exhibition a destabilizing undercurrent of fear. Meckseper utilizes the staples of American Gothic (fluorescents, broken mirrors, black birds) accompanied by the incessant booming of the acid-house soundtracks of her films to further the feeling of imminent danger that penetrates the space.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with contributions by John Cassidy, James Frey, Stephen Roach and an interview with Francesco Bonami.
By Stephen Marche [more from this author]
Antonio Zazueta Olmos
The author of A Million Little Pieces and other works of fiction.
Today is an uplifting, degrading, and all-around confusing time to be a writer in America. Even as creative-writing departments proliferate like bedbugs and each year brings a fresh (and deserving) claimant to the title of Great American Novel (The Emperor’s Children, Netherland, Freedom, all great books), content farms are herding the young and determined literati into anonymous sweatshops run by all-seeing, unforgiving masters of metrics. More people want to be writers even as continual technological breakthroughs — Blogspot, Twitter, and tablets of every shape and size — make the future of writing less solid and predictable. The old orders are falling and the new ones have not yet emerged, and worst of all, nobody, it seems, knows how to write about sex anymore. We are in a moment of literary in-betweenness, and into this world of upheaval, to everybody’s surprise, has stepped James Frey, a refugee from the great decade of American fraud, pointing the way up and out like a deranged false prophet. The man has plans.
John Bramley/DreamWorks
I Am Number Four, a story about a good-looking teenage alien and his struggle to survive.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since Oprah humiliated Frey on national television. And though he proceeded (sensibly) to make himself scarce for a while, you are going to be reading a lot about him this year, even if you’re not really meaning to. His upcoming novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, follows a man who may or may not be Christ through twenty-first-century Manhattan, and the film version of the best-selling book I Am Number Four will be released in February. The latter is the first fruit of Frey’s publishing venture, Full Fathom Five, the setup of which has caused a minor scandal. Frey finds young writers to “coproduce” commercial young-adult fiction: They write it, he controls it, they can tell their friends and parents that they’ve written a book, and he takes up to 70 percent of the royalties. Frey, at least according to some, trolls the M.F.A. programs in New York rather the way pimps in movies troll Penn Station for farmers’ daughters, but I hesitate to judge his plan. The truth is that anyone who spends $40,000 a year to be taught how to write by writers who cannot make a living by writing, or who imagines that fairness and common sense have anything to do with the publishing industry, could probably use a lesson in how life really works.
(Hemingway) Archivo Castillo Puche/EFE/Corbis; (Mailer) Interfoto/Alamy
Hemingway and Mailer are among Frey’s idols.
Which leads me to the only thing I really like about Frey: his arrogance. He unblushingly compares himself to some of the greats (Hemingway, Mailer) and believes that his new young-adult production scheme is like the work of Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei, who both hire workers to produce their oversized art. We haven’t heard this kind of boldness from a writer, this claim to an inheritance of a grand tradition, since Norman Mailer died. The best writers now are humble to the point of insanity. Before he went on his Freedom book tour, Jonathan Franzen told Terry Gross on NPR that he just hoped to hand-sell a few copies at local bookstores. (He ended up on the cover of Time.) The younger generation, meanwhile, seems to come in two flavors: the earnestly meek (Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem) and the ironically meek (Gary Shteyngart, Sam Lipsyte, Joshua Ferris). The danger of all this — and it is a real danger — is that their meekness will be taken seriously, and that writing will then be accepted as the natural domain for losers. The world today is filled with graying men who became writers so they could follow in the swaggering footsteps of Mailer, Bellow, and the other giant egos of postwar American letters. But how many young men today read, say, Jonathan Safran Foer’s dollhouse fiction and say, That’s what I want to do with my life?
With his vivid, technicolor portraits of Robert Pattinson, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and others, painter Richard Phillips explores the dark recesses of the red carpet moment.
In an age when nearly every major fashion house has a “celebrity services director” pushing photos of starlets and leading men wearing its latest pieces in front of step-and-repeats that further promote the brand, there may be no timelier artist than New York City–based painter Richard Phillips. Over the past decade Phillips has staked out a unique position in the white-hot center of the modern pop-culture nexus where film, music, fine art, and fashion constantly intersect at an endless stream of posh parties and openings. As such, his candy-hued, hyperrealistic portraits (shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York and White Cube in London) have insinuated themselves into a M.A.C campaign and the much-lauded, if fictional, Bass art collection on Gossip Girl.
“It’s probably the most disturbing show I’ve ever done, and there’s no pornography or political emblems in it,” [says] Phillips, referring to two hallmarks of his previous work. “The longer you sit with it, the truly diabolical nature, the real horror of it comes up. The idea of being caught up in ritualized consumption and these stars aren’t offering any alternative to it—they’re reinforcing it.”
Alison Flood anticipates the literary delights of the coming year
Christian-baiting has, of late, become something of a fictional trend. Philip Pullman goaded believers last year with his take on the New Testament, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which gave Jesus a manipulative twin brother. And Michel Faber’s novel The Fire Gospel saw Jesus die ignominiously on the cross with the entreaty: “Please, somebody, please finish me.”
But literary aficionados know that if it’s real controversy they’re after, there’s no one better than James Frey. His bestselling 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, contained various fabrications about his life as an alcoholic drug addict; his new novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, is out this spring, and looks likely to prove equally headline-grabbing. The book imagines what might happen if Christ returned to Earth, and was living in 21st-century New York, and having plenty of sex – with both men and women.
The story is written from the perspectives of 13 of his family, friends and followers – including an old rabbi, a young homeless man, and a surgeon. “It’s a serious attempt to write a valid Messiah story,” says Frey. “A book which addresses ideas of God and religion, and what it means if they are valid. I personally believe that if the Messiah were to arrive on Earth, he would not be an intolerant person who condemned people to hell for how they lived or who they loved.”
Frey has consulted an array of real-life religious and secular experts, from rabbis, Catholic priests and evangelical pastors, to neurosurgeons, lawyers and mental health experts. But, however well-researched the book is, its focus on Christ’s sex life will inevitably incite controversy. Why did he think the sex was so important? “Sex is part of love,” Frey says, “so if someone is preaching the gospel of love, then sex has to be a part of it. And I don’t believe that sex would be limited to sex between men and women. Jesus has sex with people he loves. So yes, in my book the Messiah has sex with men and women.”
Frey’s pretty sure that he’s “going to get blasted” for the book. But then, the writer adds, “I get blasted for everything I do.” He insists this wasn’t his motivation, however: “If you set out to enrage people, you’re just going to write a lame book. If you do it because you believe in what you’re writing, you can do something interesting and meaningful. It’s easy just to piss people off.”
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible is published by John Murray in April .
James Frey achieved a strange fame with his bestselling memoir that proved not entirely true, “A Million Little Pieces.” After going on “Oprah” to promote his book, he was brought back to face her displeasure about its exaggerations.
He moved to New York and wrote a big book set in Los Angeles. “Bright Shiny Morning” came out in 2008; David L. Ulin, who was then L.A. Times books editor, wrote it was “a terrible book. One of the worst I’ve ever read.”
But a little literary criticism wasn’t going to slow Frey down. As New York magazine reported in November, Frey has created Full Fathom Five, a company that recruits young MFA students to co-write novels with him — for as little as $500, $250 or even nothing — in hopes of sharing in the profits of their eventual blockbuster sale. The writing duties fell almost completely to the young writers: Frey would provide story ideas, writing guidance or polishing, and the connections to get the work published and in the right hands.
If it sounds suspiciously like a scam, Frey can show it’s not. “I Am Number Four,” co-written by Frey and recent Columbia MFA grad Jobie Hughes, under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore, was published in the fall of 2010. And that’s not all: It was subject to a film-rights bidding war, and the movie is being produced by Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios.
by Charlie Finch
Most of the time, I’d rather have my good times happen by accident. Such was the case when I walked down Second Avenue on a cold evening a few weeks ago to visit the Half Gallery on Forsyth Street, which, since it combines the powers, formally and informally, of Bill Powers, James Frey, Andy Spade, Carter Burden, Cynthia Rowley, Olivier Zahm and others, probably has more celebrities per square foot than all the ersatz parties in Miami Beach during the first week of December.
Opening at Half was a painter named Donald Shambroom, who lives outside of Boston. It’s his first New York exhibition in 20 years and comprises a series of mournful paintings of orange gardenias, and one of an outstretched pink hand, bowing towards a gravestone, mockingly thanking George W. Bush on behalf of the war dead of the last decade.
I asked myself where I had met this Shambroom fellow before and, when a number of familiar faces arrived, realized that I had not seen him since he was painting at Yale in 1973. Memories, none mournful, flooded back of other marginally promising painters of our era (Dirk Nelson, Frank Cole), and the faces in the room identified themselves: here was the avant-garde guitarist Gary Lucas, sidekick of Captain Beefheart; there was Robert Rubin, who curates at the Bibliotheque National; and there was painter Dennis Kardon, he of the brash nudes and frequent mentions inArtnet Magazine.
Following Oprah reprimand over first book, the controversial US writer is now accused of exploitation for group writing project
James Frey, the bad boy of American letters who was given a very public dressing-down by Oprah Winfrey over his first book - in which he passed off fiction as memoir - is back in the headlines over his latest venture, a collective writing project that some have accused of being brutal and Dickensian.
Wherever Frey goes, controversy is never far behind. Back in 2003, A Million Little Pieces, sold 8m copies but landed him in trouble after bits of it were found to have been invented.
Up to now, he has never seemed that fazed by the opprobrium heaped upon him. As an author in a crowded US literary market, there is, after all, no such thing as bad publicity.
But judging by his reaction, the reception of his new project, Full Fathom Five, has got under his skin this time.
Frey genuinely sounds peeved at the attack he has come under for what detractors say is exploiting young, unknown writers. “People like to make me out to be a villain. I don’t love that. I really have no interest in being cast as a bad boy in this case.”
The idea for Full Fathom Five emerged, he says, from his passion for the Harry Potter series. “I loved the Potter books, I read every one the day they came out. I think books are important and I wanted to help keep young people reading them like I did as a kid.”
Frey saw collective writing as a way to get around the conundrum of having umpteen ideas for clever commercial book series but never enough time to write them. He also liked the idea of applying the model of an art studio along the lines of those run by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons to the book world.
So he came up with the concept of a book-writing factory that would go beyond the basic model of existing companies such as Alloy, which use teams of writers to produce books to order.
Ideas for books, or ideally series of books, would either come from him or an author recruited to the Full Fathom Five stable. Then Frey would hold the writer’s hand, providing critical feedback as they wrote.
The finished product would be sold to publishers and/or film studios, and the writer would be given a share in the royalties as incentive to produce their best work.
He started to appeal through colleges and writing courses for budding young writers prepared to write for little upfront, in the hope of fame and riches down the line.
Frey now has 30 in his stable and has sold 12 books of three separate series. The first series, Lorien Legacies, which is hung around the conceit of a teenager alien landing in Ohio, has already been launched in the US and in the UK by Michael Joseph/Puffin and is being made into a film by DreamWorks.
The others are The Montauk Project, which centres on a 16-year-old girl who stumbles into a time machine in an old military base that really exists at the end of Long Island, and The Other World Chronicles, a modern retelling of the Arthurian legend which has been optioned by Will Smith’s film company.
The good news for Frey is that with such deals already in the bag, Full Fathom Five is off to a flying start. The bad news is the drumbeat of criticism that is building.
It began with one of the lead authors of the first volume of the Lorien Legacies, I Am Number Four, calling in lawyers to represent him in his dealings with Frey. Writer Jobie Hughes complained that he has not been credited for the book, which appeared under a pseudonym. Then New York magazine published an article by a young woman who had been in negotiations with Frey to join his factory but had been dropped by him. The magazine also revealed what it described as the “brutal” terms of the contracts offered to writers.
The contentious elements include: an upfront payment of just $250 (£156) to the writer for an entire book, which is pitiful unless the book is sold, at which point they get 30%-40% of any royalties obtained; the fact that Frey retains all final creative control and the copyright of the work in his company, with total power to decide what happens to the book; and a system of fines if the writer breaks the terms of the contract. A publishing lawyer told New York magazine that he had never seen a contract like it in his 16 years of negotiations.
Frey insists the portrait of him as a ruthless exploiter of youthful talent is wrong on several counts. First, his contracts vary according to the degree of experience of the writer and according to whether the idea for the book came from him or them.
He estimates that the central storyline of about 85% of the books under way originated with him.
Second, the contract is no more nor less “brutal” than standard contracts you would find in the law or film world. “I’m running a business in a highly litigious society. The contract is simply designed to protect Full Fathom Five and our partners like DreamWorks.”
As for the credit issue, he says many of the books he will commission will have the authors’ real names fully credited. But some will not, as fits the story in question.
I Am Number Four was written in the voice of a 16-year-old alien called Pittacus Lore, and so had that name attached to it to enhance the literary device, as was fully agreed by Hughes, Frey says. Similarly, the character of the 16-year-old girl at the heart of The Montauk Project is credited as the author as a fictional trick.
What seems to have irritated Frey most intensely is the depiction of him as money-grabbing exploiter-in-chief. That is not his motivation at all, he says: “I know I’m the bad boy of American literature, but that’s not what this is about. I’m doing this because I love books.”
For someone with a reputation as controversial as his, Frey runs the risk of sounding as though he protests too much. Watch this space: this particular controversy has the potential to run and run.
NPR STAFF
Can you tell a whole story in 25 words or fewer? Inspired by the six-word novel attributed to Ernest Hemingway — “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” — Robert Swartwood has compiled a new anthology of bite-sized fiction.
The stories in Hint Fiction are short enough to be text messages, but the genre isn’t defined only by its length. It’s characterized by the way the form forces readers to fill in the blanks, Swartwood tells NPR’s Scott Simon. Most fiction hints at a larger story, he says, but the brevity of these stories really challenges the reader’s imagination.
The short stories in Hint Fiction were selected from more than 2,000 submissions — Swartwood started small, soliciting stories on his website, but the contest grew in scope when publisher W.W. Norton got involved. The anthology also features the writing of well-known authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Ha Jin, Peter Straub and James Frey.
by Hillary Busis | 1:54 pm, November 12th, 2010
Readers of both NYMag.com and the Wall Street Journal’s website may have noticed that in the wee small hours of the morning, both publications posted similar but competing articles about author James Frey and Full Fathom Five, the book-packaging company he launched to churn out young adult fiction. As it turns out, New York’s version was rushed online only after the magazine learned that the WSJ was about to scoop them on a story they’d had in the works for weeks.
The articles’ tones vary drastically. The WSJ’s Katherine Rosman and Lauren A. E. Schuker offer a measured view of Frey’s operation, noting how little Frey pays the young writers he employs (“they get $250 upon signing and another $250 upon completion of a book”) as well as how successful its first major product, a story called I Am Number Four that’s being adapted into a movie by Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, has been. New York Magazine’s Suzanne Mozes, by contrast, is unabashedly negative in her (much-longer) piece. She accuses Frey of rampant exploitation and implies that the bestselling author is an insufferable, amoral egomaniac (“he’s in it to ‘change the game’ and ‘move the paradigm’; he won’t write anything that doesn’t change the world,” she writes).
As it turns out, Mozes has a personal ax to grind against Frey. In her article, she recalls how she was once in talks to write a book for Full Fathom Five. She implies that Frey ultimately declined to work with her because she requested a more equitable contract: “Twenty-eight minutes after I sent an e-mail requesting amendments to the contract, I received an e-mail from Frey rescinding his offer to collaborate. ‘We loved the idea that we eventually arrived at together,’ he wrote. ‘At this time, though, we don’t think this going to work out.’”
Rosman and Schuker, by contrast, have no connection to Frey outside of their article.
Book series, movie deals, disgruntled writers
By KATHERINE ROSMAN And LAUREN A. E. SCHUKER
For James Frey, success and controversy are a package deal.
His 2003 debut book, “A Million Little Pieces,” was named Amazon Book of the Year and has sold eight million copies in more than 30 languages. When it was revealed that parts of the purported memoir were actually fiction, the press turned on him and Oprah Winfrey filleted him on national television.
For Mr. Frey’s new venture, Full Fathom Five, the author oversees lesser-known writers as they develop fictional ideas into books that he then markets to publishers and film studios. Its first offering, “I Am Number Four,” is a young-adult science-fiction thriller about an alien who comes to Earth as an Ohio teenager. It was published in August and hit the best-seller list. Michael Bay brought the project to DreamWorks Studios, where partners Stacey Snider and Steven Spielberg acquired the film rights after reading the book, with Mr. Bay as producer. Starring Alex Pettyfer, Dianna Agron and Timothy Olyphant, the film will be released in February, DreamWorks’ first offering since it severed ties from Paramount and became independent, with its movies distributed by Disney.
Full Fathom Five is already wrapped in real-life drama. One writer hired attorneys to represent him when dealings with Mr. Frey grew contentious (the dispute was settled late last month). Mr. Frey says that a disgruntled writer is working on a magazine story about him. The writer declined comment. “I go to work and try to do cool things. I can’t control what people write about me,” says Mr. Frey.
Some publishers and producers are happy to look beyond his troubled past. Ms. Snider of DreamWorks is unconcerned. “Unless James is an alien,” she says, “this book is not a memoir.”
Mr. Frey began contemplating the operation that has become Full Fathom Five around the time he finished reading the last installment of the Harry Potter series in 2007. “Someone is going to replace Harry Potter,” he recalls thinking. “Maybe it’ll be me.” A co-owner of an art gallery in New York, Mr. Frey imagined a literary version of an artist’s workshop, where one person with a vision employs others to execute it. “I have too many ideas,” he says.
James Frey’s Own Personal Jesus
11/04/2010 11:30 AM
PHOTOS BY JACK SIEGEL
It’s been almost five years since The Smoking Gun called into question the veracity of James Frey’s 2003 “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, sparking a controversy that came crashing to its climax when Oprah Winfrey berated Frey on her show for misrepresenting his (or his protagonist’s, depending on how much you believe he made up) struggle with overcoming addiction. Some believed it to be a career-ending confrontation; David Carr, writing for The New York Times, described Frey and his publisher, Nan Talese, as having been “snapped in two like dry winter twigs.”
But Frey—who said he originally tried to sell the book as a novel, but was turned down by multiple publishers—carried on, inking a seven-figure deal with HarperCollins in 2007 to write a proper novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and even garnering an apology from Oprah herself. These days, Frey’s diversifying: he’s just finished a new novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, which centers on a contemporary messiah living in New York. He’s working with Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson on an HBO pilot about the porn industry. And he currently has a text-based art exhibition up at John McWhinnie—which Charlie Finch, writing for Artnet, saidRichard Prince was “second in the door” to see. We visited Frey at his office to discuss these projects, find out what he really thinks about memoirs, and peruse his iTunes.
NATE FREEMAN: You have a lot of new projects; there’s an exhibition uptown—do you want to explain how that happened?
JAMES FREY: It happened because Lisa Dennis and the chairman of Sotheby’s asked me out, and asked if I’d write an essay for their show, and I said yeah. I’ve written for a lot of artists, and I get asked to write about art a lot, so I said yeah, sure. I wrote the essay for her, and then I wanted to do something else with it. And I’ve always said I’m more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they’re given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.
So I started thinking about what else I could do with the piece, and one of the ideas I had was to start transferring what I write directly onto canvas—you know, there’s a long tradition of artists that use words in their work. The easy contemporary examples are Richard Prince or Ed Ruscha or Christopher Wool, each of whom make text-based art. They usually come at it from the other side, where the visualization of the text is as or more important than what the words actually say, and I just thought I could do the same thing—just make it so that the words are actually more important than how they’re presented.
FREEMAN: You’re still working on the book, right?
FREY: Yeah, I have a book coming out in April. I can’t talk really at this point how we’re going to release it, but it won’t be conventionally released, and the way it will be released and presented actually has much more to do with the art world than it does the publishing world.
FREEMAN: But the book itself is called Illumination?
FREY: No, it was originally called Illumination. It’s called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.
FREEMAN: And it’s about Jesus Christ coming to New York?
FREY: It’s about a guy who might be Christ, or might be the long-awaited Jewish messiah, who is alive and living in New York City. What that person would be like, what would they believe in, how would they live, how would people react to them.
FREEMAN: Was it a struggle to take all these sacred texts, and all this legend and everything, and work it in with the modern New York City in a way that was fresh and didn’t seem forced? How did you reconcile that?
FREY: I just sat down and wrote the book, man. It was a hard book to write, it took a lot longer than any other book I’ve written, but I sat down and wrote it, just like that.
FREEMAN: How do you feel about it now?
FREY: I mean, I dig it. I’m happy with it, I’m glad it’s done. I’ll let people read it and decide what they think of it. It’s irrelevant what I think of it. Once the books are done and they go into the world, I let them go.
FREEMAN: I see you have your iTunes up—do you listen to music while you write?
FREY: Yeah, I listen to music all day.
FREEMAN: Do you switch it up a lot, or is it a very specific canon of stuff that you listen to?
FREY: No, I listen to a lot of shit, man. You can click through and see what comes up. There’s The Plimsouls, do you know The Plimsouls?
FREEMAN: I think so.
FREY: You are too young to know them, maybe?
FREEMAN: Maybe.
FREY: There we would have Pearl Jam, there we would have Cyndi Lauper, there we would have Toto, there we would have Kelly Clarkson, there we would have The Spin Doctors, Elise Meyer, India.Arie, Bette Midler, The Spinners.
FREEMAN: I know The Spinners. And it’s never distracting, listening to music when you write?
FREY: Either listening to music or watching TV, I need noise of some kind.
FREEMAN: And speaking of TV, you have a new project on HBO, right? About the porn industry in LA.
FREY: Yeah, there it literally is.
FREEMAN: Is that something that you have a special knowledge of?
FREY: No, I have no knowledge of it. I spent a week in LA, and I shadowed the CEO’s of two big porn companies, and I met with a bunch of porn agents and directors and writers and producers and a bunch of porn stars, male and female. I certainly learned a lot. No, whatever I knew about it before that week I only knew as an occasional consumer of it.
FREEMAN: What drew you to that world?
FREY: It was Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson’s idea. They called me to ask if I was interested in doing it with them. I just think it’s a great world to tell stories in, to tell cool stories: money, sex, fame, and scandal. Those are great subject matters to work with. I also think it’s cool that porn is this huge business that most people in America consume in some way, though they usually do it in secret, and no one really knows anything about it. Nobody knows how it functions, what its people are like, so it’s something no one’s ever done before. I like doing things people haven’t done before. I mean, we have Boogie Nights, and that was it.
FREEMAN: Is there any precursor in literature that might set the tone for what you’re trying to do?
FREY: A precursor in literature… Tropic of Cancer.
FREEMAN: No one has really “swum in the depths” on TV.
FREY: We are going to swim in the deepest depths. We’ll see—the show is a long ways away. I’m literally writing it right now, and any TV show or film is a long process from the words on a computer to sounds and images on a screen. We’ll see what we get to do.
FREEMAN: And once the book comes out, it will be tours and readings and whatnot?
FREY: Don’t know, I think I’m done with tours and readings.
FREEMAN: Exhausting?
FREY: Yeah, I’m married, I have a couple kids, I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve done book tours a lot, I’m happy to stay home and take my kids to school and come to the office.
FREEMAN: It’s a nice office.
FREY: [LAUGHS] Thanks.
FREEMAN: Are you ever going to write nonfiction or memoirs again?
FREY: I never wrote nonfiction or memoirs.
FREEMAN: Well, anything that explicitly is about your past?
FREY: I mean, I don’t know. The next book I’ll write is about Timothy McVeigh.
FREEMAN: Really?
FREY: Yeah. But I don’t know what I’ll do after that. I know the next book I’m going to write will be about Timothy McVeigh. But I don’t ever think about nonfiction or fiction or memoirs. That’s shit that publishers make up to sell stuff, you know? Most books aren’t pure nonfiction or fiction. Memoirs are all as full of shit as mine was. I just write books, I just tell stories. I don’t care what people call them. And for the most part, I’m done letting mainstream publishers release them in ways that don’t make me comfortable.
FREEMAN: Why Timothy McVeigh?
FREY: Because it’s a great American story with a lot of room to work in.
FREEMAN: Do you have any personal connection to the bombings?
FREY: None.
FREEMAN: He hasn’t really been explored at all, I guess…
FREY: There are a number of nonfiction books written, American Terrorist, there are a lot of unanswered questions. And I’m not a conspiracy-theory person, but it was a fucked-up situation that was never really explained, and I just think it would be a great story. I think about what Mailer did with The Executioner’s Song, where he told sort of the “great American story” about crime and murder and death and execution.
FREEMAN: Would you classify or consider your upcoming book a “great American story?” It’s sort of a loaded question.
FREY: I’m not going to classify it as anything. I’ll let people read it and decide what they think. I guess like I say, classifications and all that shit, I’ll let other people worry about that. I’m just going to write my books and do my work and release it. Let the world decide what it is, and if it’s any good or not.
JAMES FREY’S EXHIBITION OF TEXT-BASED ARTWORK, IL DIVINO BAMBINO, IS ON DISPLAY AT JOHN MCWHINNIE AT GLENN HOROWITZ GALLERY THROUGH NOVEMBER 9. FOR MORE ON JAMES FREY, VISIT HIS WEBSITE.
I can’t understand why most people believe in medicine and don’t believe in art, without questioning either.
Damien Hirst, 1997
L&M Arts present an exhibition of early medicine cabinets by Damien Hirst. Assembled together for the first time are the seminal Sex Pistols cabinets from 1989. Each cabinet takes its name from one of the twelve title tracks of the legendary 1977 debut punk album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.”
A fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Arthur Danto, James Frey and Steve Jones, including a catalogue raisonné of the complete medicine cabinets, will accompany the exhibition.
WHERE’S THE BABY?
by Charlie Finch
My friend, the controversial novelist James Frey, insisted that I come to his art show at McWhinnie Gallery on East 64th Street, so, of course, I was first in the door. Second in the door was Richard Prince, whom I must truthfully confess, I had never actually met before.
He gave me a sour look, upon learning who I am supposed to be. Back to Jim Frey: he was commissioned by Sotheby’s to contribute an essay to the catalogue for “Divine Comedy,” a contemporary take on Dante’s epic poem, and, as Jim explained to me, “Charlie, I think of myself as an artist, so I have put these texts on panels at McWhinnie and a collector has purchased this unique piece for $95,000 in advance of the show.”
Jim wouldn’t tell me the name of the collector, but challenged me to read the whole text, which I proceeded to do. It begins as a clever pastiche of Dante’s tour, taking Virgil, the great Roman epic poet, on a journey through hell and, then, heaven, which Frey summarizes as a contrast between WalMart (Hell) and Candyland (Heaven).
The explication is felicitous but the kicker lies in the last panel, for here Frey chronicles the death of his infant son in New York Hospital’s neonatal unit in 2008. The end of Frey’s text redounds with his walks through Central Park, hearing the voice of his child. Jim told me, “I think of him every moment,” and I responded, “Jim, you have 16 balls to expose your tragic thoughts on a gallery wall.”
It may seem superfluous, but I, Charlie Finch, spent 47 days in the New York Hospital neonatal until my mother was given the word that there was no hope.
I’m still here, but Jim Frey’s boy is not. I embrace you, friend, for turning him into “art,” for if something is missing, it must be art, love, Charlie.
James Frey, “Il Divino Bambino,” Oct. 13-Nov. 9, 2010, at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 50½ East 64th Street, New York, N.Y. 10065
CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).
