Count on David Sedaris to sidestep the whole thorny memoir-truth issue with humor. When 'When You Are Engulfed In Flames'comes out next month, it "will carry a short preface, labeling the contents 'real-ish.'" I guess I've always thought that if 97 percent of the story is true, then that's an acceptable formula," he told the Christian Science Monitor.

Sedaris goes on to say that "we live in a time when our government is telling us some pretty profound lies. And then James Frey writes a book and it turns out some of it's not true. No one asked for their vote back, but everyone wanted back the money they'd spent on that book. We're in the shadow of huge lies and getting angry about the small ones."

The issue of how long someone whose sales were predicated on sympathy and trust spent in jail might not seem like a "small lie" to everyone, of course, but yeah, it's not a WMD-level whopper. So I guess I, like, 97% agree with Sedaris.

"I wouldn't say that birds are Jewish," Jonathan Rosen said, with some light chuckling from the audience, during the Q&A portion of his lecture at the John Templeton Foundation's inaugural book forum earlier this week. Elaborating on the question, he emphasized that the condition birds spoke to, the one that inspired the questioning comparison—"we do not know exactly where we belong, where our native ground is, where our homes are"—was, particularly in the early 21st century, more universal in scope. Other questions from the audience were more playful: "Are there bagel-eating pigeons riding the A train into Manhattan?" Rosen responded in disbelief to one such query.

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After reading a recent GalleyCat post that described In the Belly of the Beast, this year's Lexus Original Fiction Series project, as "a matter of branding gone wrong," Mark Haskell Smith (left), who came up with the concept for the serial novel and recruited the nine authors who will be taking part, emailed me suggesting that evaluation was unfair. "Is it more or less wrong than Spike Lee directing a film for Nokia?" Smith asked rhetorically. "Is it more or less wrong than Oprah Winfrey choosing a novel for her show... or Starbucks picking a book to sell in their stores?"

(Full disclosure: Not only am I friendly with Smith, but Channel V Media, which represents Story Worldwide, the "brand storytelling" firm behind Lexus's print and online magazines, is also my PR firm.)

"Lexus did a focus group," Smith says of the serial's origins. "Lexus owners listed travel, food, and reading as their top three leisure activities. So Lexus decided to add some fiction to their magazine... The project was undertaken in the spirit of fun. The writers got to do, basically, whatever they wanted, within minimal guidelines. The guidelines were more about sex, drugs, and drunk driving than selling the vehicle. So here's an opportunity for nine writers to get their writing, bios, and info about their novels out to a million readers. Is that a sellout or a clever use of new media—specialty publishing—to reach readers and maybe sell some books?"

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If you thought Sloane Crosley's publicist Melissa Broder had it pretty weird, imagine being God's publicist. Matt Staggs is the "humble servant and messenger of God," aka Pushcart Prize winner Thomas M. Disch who declared himself to be God in 2005. With the July publication of Disch's first novel in nine years The Word of God coming up from Tachyon, he's begun answering questions from the faithful on live journal.

"As God's publicist, I can tell you that I have to be on my "A" game." Says Staggs. " If you've read any of God's prior bestselling works (particularly the Old Testament), you know that he can be a tough and demanding client. I'm hoping that he'll be giving me a staff that turns into a snake, or at least some good pull-quotes with which I can woo the media. Either would be sufficient!"

You may recall Monday's blind item from the former assistant to a "top-notch" African-American novelist, who said that the woman in question had one berated him in class for allegedly trying to derail her career. Well, a day went by and nobody guessed right, so Keith Josef Adkins decided to tell a more detailed version of the story on his Blogspot blog, giving the author the 'fake' name of "Xem Tilson Fartier," which is a reasonable indication that he's talking about Xam Wilson Cartiér, the author of Be-Bop, Re-Bop and Muse-Echo Blues.

If you guessed somebody else (like I did), you can probably be forgiven: Cartiér seems to have dropped off the literati's radar more than a decade ago, so if some guy comes around and says "I was an assistant to a famous African-American novelist who was published by Random House," I doubt she'd be the first, second, or even third name to pop into your head. But as long as we're here, anybody know what happened to her?

Michael Chabon showed up for the creative writing program at University of California-Irvine in the mid-1980s with a head full of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Donald Barthelme... but also J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and Ursula K. LeGuin. The plan, he told me as we chatted in a hotel bar last week, was to write "intensely literary fiction that was equally steeped in genre," but he soon found that his classmates were completely befuddled and unwilling to critique the stories he was submitting. "I didn't want to get into a fight every time I presented a story," he recalled, so he wound up writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which ultimately became his debut novel, as an attempt at working within the traditional coming-of-age genre. "In a way, it was a kind of retreat," he admits, "and I've been... sneaking out at first, but now more clearly into the place I always wanted to be."

That place is exemplified by The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a detective story set in an alternate history where, after the Second World War, a Jewish colony was established in Alaska rather than the Middle East. Less than a week before our meeting, the novel had received a Nebula from the Science Fiction Writers of America; later that night, Chabon would find out whether he'd be able to add an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America to his trophy shelf. (For the record, John Hart wound up winning.) And I'd invited to our conversation a writer who knew exactly what it was like to have the same book up for both awards: Jeffrey Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass.

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It turns out that yesterday's blind item, in which a former assistant to a major African-American novelist recounts the indignities he suffered under her wing, isn't as clearcut as I originally thought. Over at Tayari Jones's blog, and in email backchannels some guesses are being made, with three very viable candidates (and little clarity) emerging. In the meantime, Jones shares her own stories from the assistant life:

"I won't say too much about my experiences, but I will say that it is a hard and personal job... I don't look back at my time as a writers assistant as the happiest time of my life, but I am glad I did it. Although the publishing world has on a few occaisions shown me nastiness that caught me by surprise, my assistant years gave me, at the very least, a glimpse of what was to come and I've done my best to be ready for it."

Would now be a good time to plug Kate Christensen's debut novel, In the Drink? I believe it would be. Also, if you've got stories of literary assistant hell, by all means, share them with us in the comments sections, with as much or as little identifying detail as you care to reveal.

When Deborah Baker moved to Calcutta in the 1990s to be with her new husband, novelist Amitav Ghosh, "Americans weren't very popular," she recalls. "Everyone was very nice, but there was a lot of suspicion." One friendly haven she found was in the home of Tarapada Roy, a writer who had known Allen Ginsberg when the poet made his pilgrimage to India thirty years earlier. In a way, Baker reflects, "Ginsberg had made it a little easier for one to be an American in India."

(Baker and her husband are stiil spending time in Calcutta and Brooklyn, even more so in the years since Baker left her career in book publishing (she was last a nonfiction editor at Little, Brown "four years ago, it might even be five") and still more as their children approach college age.)

The thought stayed with her, and, years later, she tracked down the history of Ginsberg and other Beat writers' travels to India and turned those stories into A Blue Hand. After spending six months writing the proposal, Baker says ("that's the hardest part, trying to figure out how to tell the story"), she submitted it to Penguin Press on a Friday, and had an offer the following Monday. She was given nearly two years to deliver a final manuscript, but wound up handing it in seven months early.

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One of the few times I ventured outdoors at the LA Times Festival of Books was to meet actress and screenwriter Heather Thomas at the booth for Book Soup, where she was signing copies of her debut novel, Trophies, a cutthroat satire where the wives of entertainment industry power players stake out their own philanthropic "turfs" and sponsoring the wrong charity event can provoke an orchestrated downfall and humiliation. After the signing was over, Thomas and I found a shady spot to chat about how the book came together—and why, she says, "if you want to get something off the ground, [you] go find a trophy wife."

Originally, she explained, when a friend suggested that she write a TV show set "behind the scenes" of the trophy wife subculture, she balked: "Who'd give a rat's ass about us?" (Thomas readily counts herself among the ranks: She's been married to powerhouse attorney Skip Brittenham for more than 15 years, and her breakfast salons have become a must-invite for Hollywood and D.C. types.) Eventually, she came around and co-wrote a pilot for a show about three wives who accidentally solve murders in their spare time, but then Gigi Levangie Grazer suggested she write a novel—and one thing led to another, and one day Thomas was meeting with Judith Regan. "I'm like a Fuller Brush man," Thomas recalls. "I'm pulling out 500 different ideas... She picked this one." Regan stood by her as the scope of the novel expanded, loosening the deadline for delivery, but after the controversial publisher's departure from HarperCollins, her new editors at William Morrow told her she had seven months to turn the manuscript in. (Not a problem, Thomas recounted, as she was used to completing TV pilots and screenplays with much less time.)

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On May 28, Penguin UK and Doubleday in the US will celebrate the centennial of Ian Flemming's birth by publishing the 36th Bond book, Devil May Care, written by Sebastian Faulks (Charlotte Gray). Devil May Care is set in the cold war, picking up where Fleming left off in 1966 with Octopussy and The Living Daylights. But would Ian Fleming, who only saw the first two Bond movies before his death in 1964, care for train wreck and Grammy award winner Amy Winehouse recording the theme for the latest 007 flick, Quantum of Solace? Well, there's no worry of him rolling over in his grave, Variety just reported that Winehouse has backed out of recording it, and

according to her producer Mark Ronson, it would take "some miracle of science" to finish it, as the singer is "not ready to record any music."

More on jinxed film and how Fleming stamps the UK after the jump

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