from Accidental Sexiness

Who Owns This Booty? August 9, 2008

It’s Selma Blair! She is on set of her new t.v. show for NBC entitled, Kath and Kim. She is holding a copy of James Frey’s book, “[Bright Shiny Morning].”

[ click to visit the Accidental Sexiness blog ] 

Sunday, August 10th, from 5-7pm

Book release party for Wives, Wheels, Weapons

On Sunday August 10th, from 5-7 pm, join Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in celebrating the latest release of JMc & GHB Editions: James Frey’s Wives, Wheels, Weapons. Published as a companion volume to Frey’s latest novel, Bright, Shiny Morning(Harper Collins, 2008), Wives, Wheels, Weapons is an artists’ book made in collaboration with Terry Richardson and Richard Prince. The book excerpts three vignettes, “Wives”, “Wheels”, and “Weapons,” from Frey’s novel and presents them alongside a photo essay by photographer Terry Richardson. The hardcover edition features dust-jacket images by Richard Prince. Frey, Richardson and Prince will attend and copies of the book will be available for signing.

The book contains historical vignettes of LA, tracing its corruption and its foibles, until – as always happens in the best novels – the city itself becomes a character; a wild and volatile multi-tentacled beast capable of bestowing great hurt (and the odd chunk of real love) on those who are enmeshed in it.–Irvine Welsh, The Guardian.

Wives, Wheels, Weapons is an edition of 2,000, of which 1,000 hardcover and 1,000 softcover copies have been released simultaneously. Hardcover: $75; softcover: $45. 

[ click to read details at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller ]

click to enter contest at InStyle

competition

THE PRIZE:

Win one of ten copies of James Frey’s latest novel, Bright Shiny Morning

Critically acclaimed writer James Frey returns with yet another moving tale, this time the purely fictional Bright Shiny Morning. Set in Los Angeles, it follows the lives of a group of characters in pursuit of their dreams in the relentless metropolis, from the bum on the boardwalk to the Hollywood mega-star with a big secret. Instyle.co.uk is offering you the chance to win a copy of this moving book as it hits bookshelves this week. Simply fill in your details below.

Find out more at www.james-frey.com

[ click to enter contest ] 

from The New York Observer

Pretty Good, For a Book Publisher! Harper Collins Stars Frey, Wall, Oz Earn Rupert Murdoch … Millions!

BY LEON NEYFAKH  |  AUGUST 5, 2008

Getty Images

News Corp.’s fourth quarter earnings report is in, and it looks like HarperCollins made Rupert Murdoch about as much money this year ($160 million) as it did in 2007. His TV, cable, and film divisions, meanwhile, made him about $1.3 billion each!

Sorry, sorry, just some perspective. Back to HarperCollins: earnings for this quarter ($29 million) were down slightly compared to Q3, but up by a full third compared to Q4 last year. According to the summary provided in the report, the biggest titles of the quarter were James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning, Elissa Wall’s Stolen Innocence, and an updated edition of YOU: The Owner’s Manual by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet Oz.

For reference, Bright Shiny Morning has clocked 59,973 copies on BookScan, which means that it has actually sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 86,000. List price for the book was $26.95 per book, which puts gross sales for each copy at about $13.50 and gross sales overall at about $1.2 million.

[ click to read at Observer.com ]

via Brightcove.tv

from Brightcove.tv

from the Single Broke Female blog 

SINGLE BROKE FEMALE

THE INCESSANT RAMBLINGS OF A SINGLE 20 SOMETHING TRYING TO GET HER LIFE AND HER DEBTS IN SOME SORT OF ORDER…WELL, HERE’S HOPING ANYWAY!

SUNDAY, 3 AUGUST 2008

I got paid on Thursday and sent £150 to my credit card…I’m now thinking that maybe that wasn’t such a good idea! I have just run a total of how much cash I have til the end of the month and it’s not very much! 

Thankfully, this weekend was pretty cheap as I didn’t do much; on Friday I took myself off to a book signing in Oxford Street where James Frey was promoting his new book, Bright Shiny Morning. I am currently half way through A Million Little Pieces and can’t put it down so when I saw he had a new book out and was doing a signing, I was intrigued to go along and see what he was like. I have to say he was very charming and wrote in my book ‘You are a beautiful woman, have a beautiful life, a beautiful life’ which I thought was lovely. Saturday I had the trip to the dentist which was the usual £16 for a 5 minute check up and clean- pointless! I wish we had US dentist standards here! Then I just went to my mums as I am still feeling under the weather and just wanted to be looked after, pathetic I know but what can you do!?

[ click to read more of the SINGLE BROKE FEMALE ]

from The Guardian UK

Saved by the City of Angels

Irvine Welsh is entranced by James Frey’s tale of redemption – ‘the literary comeback of the decade’

• The Guardian,
• Saturday August 2 2008

James Frey’s first foray into the world of books, his supposed autobiography A Million Little Pieces, was a spectacular debut in that it provoked that rarest of events: a genuine literary scandal. The book, and its follow-up My Friend Leonard, were grim tales of a life of addiction, depravity and criminality, written with uncompromising turbo-charged power. Endorsed by literary kingmaker Oprah Winfrey in her book club, A Million Little Pieces went on to swiftly achieve bestseller status.

There was only one problem: the life and the events depicted had little to do with the author. The Smoking Gun website undertook a thorough investigation, through court reports and interviews with local police officials, producing a damning rebuttal of Frey’s incarceration claims. Old cohorts were hunted down, who testified to his unremarkable rather than misspent youth. The biographies amounted to more than a white suburban kid’s petty exaggerations of his misdemeanours; the Smoking Gun highlighted many outright fabrications, one of which was particularly shameful and highly distressing to the friends and family of a girl who had died in a road accident.

Frey was originally feted by Hollywood and many of its stars, excited by what they saw as the real deal in that chamber of artifice. His transformation from literary hero to pariah was complete when his publishers were compelled to admit to the falsifications in the books, and even took the unprecedented step of offering purchasers their money back. Frey gamely reappeared on Oprah, where the host, livid at being cast as an unwitting stooge in the scam, tore strips off both him and his publisher, eliciting sheepish confessions. For the US reading public, it was a bit like finding out that Frank McCourt grew up in a luxury penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

You would perhaps think that the only occasion on which Frey might have been inclined to look at a pen and paper again would have been filling in a bookie’s slip with a trembling hand. But he has shown remarkable resilience, producing Bright Shiny Morning, a work of fiction that carries the disclaimer: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.” That acknowledgment is of course redundant here, belonging instead on his first two works.

The amazing thing about Bright Shiny Morning is that it is an absolute triumph of a novel. In fact, it’s so good that it makes Frey’s real-life resurrection from crooked biographer to great American novelist far more impressive than his fantasised one from down-and-out drug monster to bestselling writer. Freed from the responsibility of getting the facts right, Frey, a natural novelist to his fingertips, hits the deeper truths with this honest, vibrant and tender portrait of Los Angeles and the American dream. It’s Bright Shiny Morning, not A Million Little Pieces, that is the real tale of stunning redemption.

As Frey depicts a litany of lost and hopeful souls who are sucked into the City of Angels, the novel becomes a comprehensive biography of that most alluring and dangerous metropolis. He understands LA, its attractions and dangers, and the diverse aspirants who navigate its choked freeways, cheap motels, seedy apartments and gated mansions. The touching love story of runaways Dylan and Maddy and the well-meaning beach bum Joe, who woke up one morning 30 years older, runs side by side with the tale of the predatory closet-homosexual movie star Amberton and his sham business-partner wife, Casey. Then there is the self-conscious cleaner Esperanza, abused by a rich, racist white woman before finding an unlikely but convincing love.

The book contains historical vignettes of LA, tracing its corruption and its foibles, until – as always happens in the best novels – the city itself becomes a character; a wild and volatile multi-tentacled beast capable of bestowing great hurt (and the odd chunk of real love) on those who are enmeshed in it. By its end, the reader has been privy to that rarest of things: a searing critique of the world we’ve created, yet an uncompromising affirmation of our humanity.

Bukowski has been cited as one of Frey’s literary antecedents, but the truth is that the former never wrote a novel as good as Bright Shiny Morning. The voice is assured yet compassionate, and only occasionally slips out of register, usually when Frey falls back into the showboating sneer of A Million Little Pieces: “At the turn of the century, when opium and cocaine were outlawed (yeah, both used to be legal, woohoo, woohoo), and alcohol and prostitution became the area’s primary business …”

Such lapses, though, are very rare in a beautifully disciplined and weighted novel, propelled forward with great narrative skill. It can be no exaggeration to say that Bright Shiny Morning amounts to the literary comeback of the decade. It may be a pitiful weakness that led Frey down the road to deceit in A Million Little Pieces, but by penning his own resurrection, he has demonstrated unquestionable courage and a wholly justified self-belief in his skills as a writer. If his story tells us anything, it’s that being a deluded fantasist and pathological liar may be a disadvantage for a biographer, but it’s a decided asset for a novelist.

As hard as it may be for many to swallow, particularly those who place a premium on personal integrity, James Frey is probably one of the finest and most important writers to have emerged in recent years. Nobody likes to be conned, but real lovers of enlightened, cutting-edge contemporary fiction who elect to miss Bright Shiny Morning on the basis of the myriad deceptions contained in A Million Little Pieces are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

· Irvine Welsh’s latest novel is Crime (Cape)

[ click to read at The Guardian ]

from the Times Online UK 

August 2, 2008

The US antihero: James Frey

Author James Frey talks about ambition, Oprah, and his new life 

Alan Franks

Going along the clean and orderly main street of tiny Amagansett, way out at the end of Long Island, you don’t see the place as an obvious home for one of the most notorious US antiheroes. Never in modern America has a man been more publicly hissed at for writing about his life than 38-year-old James Frey, author of the bestselling A Million Little Pieces. This told the story of the war he had waged, and won, against cocaine and alcohol addiction. It was a raging, blood-spitting tour de force, powering its way in the rawest prose through degradation and near-death to the green shoots of recovery. It was a young man’s journey as ground-breaking as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road half a century before. America was hooked. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t put it down, and after her massively influential TV book club made it a must-read in September 2005, its sales soared higher still and it became the fastest-selling title in the club’s ten-year history.

The trouble was, some of the stuff in the book wasn’t true, even though it was billed as non-fiction. When Oprah got him on the show to explain, in January the following year, she called him a liar and went for him like a hell-cat.

The audience carried on booing him through the commercial breaks. The public picked up the habit and heckled him in the streets of New York, Boston, small towns, wherever he happened to be. Doing a Frey came to mean passing fiction off as fact. The many discrepancies between his book and what had actually happened, or hadn’t, were first brought to light by the investigative website The Smoking Gun. The most serious was that while the Frey of the memoir has served three months in jail for hitting a cop with his car, assault with a deadly weapon and violent resistance to arrest, the Frey of real life has done just five hours, after being issued with two traffic tickets. According to police, he was polite and well behaved. There were many more discrepancies, including his part in the death of a young woman, which turned out to be negligible, and an attack which left him needing 40 stitches to the face (no signs of such surgery today).

These and others were then chewed over remorselessly by the press. They were seen as important not just because they were made up, or exaggerated, but because of their impact on the rest of the story, particularly the question of how its troubled young hero is going to face the consequences of his crimes.

Frey’s fall from grace was a mighty and public one. Barely a few months before his exposure, the people stopping him on the sidewalks were doing so in order to praise him for his fearless honesty. Some wanted just to touch him. Now they wanted to sneer. His publisher and agent dropped him, and Warner Bros scrapped its plans for the movie. The Frey story was parodied in an episode of South Park. It featured a character called Towelie, a pot-smoking towel who writes a made-up memoir and gets it in the neck from Oprah. Frey and his wife decamped for a while to France – literary, liberal France – to escape the vilification.

Even before it all exploded, Frey, he now says himself, was having trouble with the relationship between fact and fiction, and sought help from a therapist. As he tells it, the problem was that he had become famous overnight, was being hailed as a guru, and couldn’t handle it. “When something like that happens to you,” he says, “your reality changes in a very dramatic way. I lost my anonymity very quickly. If you want to become rich, be a banker. If you want to become famous, be a movie star. But writers, even many of my favourites, I wouldn’t recognise if they walked down the street.”

No such obscurity for him, although here too he appears conflicted, cherishing the privacy of his family life but also wanting acclaim on the scale of Mailer and Hemingway and the other famous bad boys of American letters. There are some critics who are saying this is not such an outrageous hope as it sounds. Mailer, a fan, came to his aid when the storm was at its fiercest, inviting him to his Brooklyn Heights home and explaining how America always needed a villain and was deciding that Frey was it; Bret Easton Ellis, author of the disturbing novel American Psycho, also became a friend. “During the Oprah stuff I called him and said, ‘Dude, what the f*** do I do?’, and he laughed and said, ‘You have so far exceeded any of the messes I made that I can no longer give you advice.’” And the therapist’s recommendation? “To separate my own self from the public [self]. Separate myself from the book.”

He has done his best. For a start, he’s been clean and sober for 15 years. Amagansett, just one stop from the end of the rural Long Island Rail Road, has an air of comfortable normality: soft furnishing stores, good cafés, unimpeachable $3 million homes behind white picket fences. The place doesn’t preen quite like the Hamptons that you come through to get here. It’s friendly but not over-interested. At the boarding house just down from the Freys, the people who run it don’t even know he’s living here.

When his wife comes into the room, she is stepping straight out of his fiction. There is a woman of the same name, Maya, with whom James falls in love in My Friend Leonard, the 2005 novel which took his story on into the early days of recovery. She is a warm, pretty woman, was with him through the troubles, and the two are plainly devoted. They first met when they were next-door neighbours in Los Angeles and started dating when he returned to the city three years later. She used to work as a creative director at an advertising agency in New York, where they also have a $2.5 million flat in SoHo. On a day like today, with the sun on the pool and a gentle breeze coming up from the beach, Frey’s main job is taking their three-year-old daughter Maren to nursery school.

He has a new book out, Bright Shiny Morning, which sprawls and brawls across Los Angeles, presenting the lives of the highest achievers and lowest losers in that most stratified of American cities. Capitalising on what has gone before, the publicity blurb bears a single sentence, garishly repeated in blue and red capitals: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.” As if to enrage his enemies still further, Frey has punctuated the book with lists of facts about the development of LA. They might have been taken from an encyclopaedia – but an unreliable one. When asked whether these “facts” are true, he gives a crooked smile and says, “About 75 per cent.” To his amusement, one reviewer has already been drawn into the game, writing that he hoped the fact checkers at HarperCollins had done their work properly. But this is fiction, billed and marketed as such. Fiction has no responsibilities to literal truth. This begs the obvious question of why Frey did not publish A Million Little Pieces as fiction in the first place. The answer is that he tried, but was turned down by 17 publishers, including Doubleday, which eventually took it, with some reworking, as a memoir.

The furore that he is only now emerging from was largely about trade descriptions and consumer protection. He will probably never fully escape from it: the notoriety has given him the profile to operate as the thing he wanted to be in the first place, a novelist. The British press did not share the same sense of having been duped. We seemed more ready to accept such notions as the fallibility of memory, the impulse to embellish, the blurring of genre boundaries and, above all, the essential truth at the heart of a work, no matter what protocols may have been flouted in its presentation. That was always his defence, and still is when he feels like acknowledging the attack. This he does not always do, tending to counter the old arguments against him by saying, repeatedly, “I don’t care.”

Oprah’s America was having none of this essential-truth business. The nation, deeply worried about the way the White House had sold the war in Iraq, had a hunger for plain truth.

[ click to continue reading at Times Online ]

from The Independent

Book Extract: Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey

Frey’s first novel tells the story of LA and the lost souls who live there

Sunday, 3 August 2008 

She is 26 years old. She is originally from Indianapolis. She has lived in LA for nine months, she moved here to become a publicist, her family did not approve. Three weeks ago she was walking through a parking garage, it was late at night, she had been on a first date, she had had two glasses of wine with dinner. Her date had wanted to walk to her car, but she liked him, really liked him, he was a year older, an entertainment attorney, someone who wanted, like her, a career and later a family, and she knew if he walked to her car he would try to kiss her. She wanted to take it slowly, try to engage in as old-fashioned a dating process as possible. She said she’d be fine. He said he would call her. She smiled and said she looked forward to it. She walked away.

She had been in the garage many times, her office was down the street, it was in Santa Monica, which is a safe, wealthy, stable community. The garage was fairly empty. She took an elevator to the fourth floor. She got out and started walking towards her car, which was on the opposite side of the garage.

She immediately felt uneasy. She started walking more quickly something was wrong wrong she was suddenly terrified absolutely fucking terrified something was wrong. She was 20 feet from her car, 15, 10 she reached for her keys 10 feet away as she reached for her keys she was terrified. He stepped out from between two cars, came at her from behind, she was five feet away, her keys in her hand.

Ricky hasn’t had a job in four years. He used to work at a printing shop, but it closed due to advances in printing technology that allowed small businesses to do their own printing. He went on unemployment, it ran out, he couldn’t find another job, printing shops all over the city were going under. He liked sitting at home watching television and drinking beer all day, so he stopped trying to find another job. He needed money, was trying to figure out how to get it, when a friend, a convicted felon, called him and asked him to buy a gun (felons can’t buy firearms in California). He went to Larry’s Firearms with the friend, bought a 9mm semi-automatic handgun and a California-legal assault rifle using the friend’s money. When he got home with the weapons, he filed off the serial numbers. He charged his friend, who needed good weapons for his work, 500 bucks.

That felon told another felon who told another felon. Ricky started making money. Under California law, he could only buy one handgun a month, but there was no limit on the number of assault rifles, and if needed, he could always go to Arizona or Nevada to circumvent the California law. He bought a set of files and some hydrochloric acid to make the serial numbers disappear properly. At this point, not one of the 300 firearms he has bought for convicted felons has been traced back to him.

He’s in Larry’s today with a man named John. John just got out of prison for manslaughter and wants an assault rifle. Ricky doesn’t ask why, but John makes several comments about an ex-wife, a former business partner, and some missing money. Larry is showing them AKs and AR-15s, weapons that can be easily converted from semi-automatic to full automatic. Ricky, as per John’s instructions, buys one of each. He also buys the parts that allow the conversion from semi-auto to full, and a book with instructions on exactly how to do it. Ricky will have to wait a day to pick up the weapons, and will need two more days to get rid of the serial numbers. At that point, he will turn them over to John, and if asked, will deny ever meeting him, speaking to him or having anything to do with him. What John does with the weapons is none of his business. None.

He held a gun to her head, made her drive into the hills above Malibu, made her park at the end of a remote fire lane. He raped her in the backseat. He pistol-whipped her. He threw her into the dirt and drove away.

It took her four hours to find help. She went to the hospital, filed a police report. The incident was reported in the papers and on the local news. There were no fingerprints. There was no DNA.

She didn’t tell her parents or her co-workers. She didn’t want to hear I told you so, she didn’t want any pity. She took her vacation and she stayed at home in bed and cried for two weeks. She called the detective working on her case twice a day, there were no leads.

When she went back to work, she was a different person, she no longer smiled, laughed, she ate lunch alone, she left at exactly five and never went out with her co-workers. The man she had dated that night called her and she never called back, he called three more times she never called back. She saw a therapist it didn’t help. She saw a rape counsellor it didn’t help. She saw a pastor it didn’t help. She joined a support group it didn’t help. She started drinking it didn’t help.

She recognised him when he took her order at a fast-food restaurant. He had worn a mask and she didn’t see his face, but she knew his voice and she knew his eyes. He smiled at her as she ordered. He asked if they knew each other from somewhere. He asked her name. There was no mistaking the fact that he knew who she was, and he knew that she recognised him. He touched her hand as he passed her order over the counter. As she walked away, he smiled at her and said I hope to see you again.

She never went back to her job. She stopped leaving the house she was scared. She didn’t pick up the phone or use her computer. She stared at the ceiling, at her pillow, at her wall. She never looked in the mirror. This morning she woke up and she showered and, for the first time in months, she put on her makeup and did her hair. She looked beautiful, like the girl who had arrived from Indianapolis with dreams, with a future, with a life ahead of her. She went out for breakfast with two of her friends from work. She called the man who had taken her on the date and apologised for not calling him earlier. She sent e-mails to friends and called her parents. She told them all that she loved them.

When she was done she drove to Larry’s Firearms. She bought a brand-new Colt .45. She submitted the information necessary to acquire the weapon. She left with a smile. Tomorrow she’s going to pick up the weapon, bring it home, load it. At that point, she will make the decision, find him and shoot him in the face and kill him, or put the gun in her own mouth and blow the back of her head away. Either way, she will think of him just before she pulls the trigger, think of him touching her and smiling at her, think of him standing behind the counter knowing that she recognised him. Either way, her life will be over. She is going to think of him touching her and smiling at her. She is going to pull the trigger.

Larry closes the shop, goes home eats dinner and drinks a six-pack of nice, cold American beer. He sleeps without a care.

© James Frey 2008

‘Bright Shiny Morning’ by James Frey is published on Thursday by John Murray, at £12.99

from geordiegirls ‘A Little Bit of Me’ blog

Long over due

Aug. 2nd, 2008 at 12:43 PM

Here’s a catch up on the books I’ve read… I’ve probably forgotten a few by now. 

29, Wonderboy, Fiona Gibson
28, Endgame, Andy Secombe
27, The Accidental, Ali Smith
26, Crime Zero, Michael Cordy
25, Dead Beat, Jim Butcher
24, A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon
23, Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
22, Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife
21, Philip Pullman, Northern Lights
20, Angels and Demons, Dan Brown
19, The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penny
18, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know, Ranulph Fiennes
17, Broken Angels, Richard Montanari
16, The Skin Gods, Richard Montanari
15, The Rosary Girls, Richard Montanari
14, The Keep, Jennifer Egan
13, The Lucifer Code, Michael Cordy
12, Childhood Interrupted, Kathleen O’Malley
11, Belle De Jour, The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl
10, Belle De Jour: diary of a London Call Girl
9, My Friend Leonard, James Frey
8, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey
7, Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett
6, Sleepers, Lorenzo Carcaterra
5, A safe place, Lorenzo Carcaterra
4, Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
3, Equal Rites, Terry Pratchett
2, The abortionist’s daughter, Elisabeth Hyde
1, The survivor, James Herbert

[ click to read more of A Little Bit Of Me ]