“Early in the submission process, James raised the issue of whether he could publish it as an autobiographical novel—ONLY, he said, to spare his family undue embarrassment, NOT because it wasn’t true. I told him I would bring it up with a few publishers, which I did, and the response was unanimous: if the book is true, it should be published as a memoir. James personally explained to his editor that the events depicted in the book took place as described. Based on the information given us by the author, [editor] Sean McDonald and [publisher] Nan Talese believed in good faith they were buying a memoir, just as I believed I was selling them one.”

After all the revelations, Evashevski no longer trusts her former client enough to feel like she can continue repping his work, but she still thinks he’s talented: “[I] suspect we haven’t heard the last of James Frey,” she says.

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In a statement released by the publisher and picked up by the Bookseller, m.d. Roland Philipps said: “The controversy over James Frey’s memoir has been followed closely at John Murray and Hodder Headline. It is not the policy or stance of the company to publish non-fiction books where the accuracy of the facts as the author knows them is in doubt.”

The author’s note — and you know, for all that everyone’s making statements about the fact that one will be written, has anyone actually seen a draft of the damn thing? — will eventually be prominently displayed at Hodder Headline’s website. Assuming, of course, Frey actually writes it…

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The crux of the problem has to do with negative billing — you get a free item, they the company sends more stuff and a bill to follow while hiding opt-out clauses deep in the fine print. And when clients tried to cancel their membershipt, according to the suit, “they were harassed, deceived, intimidated, and threatened.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Seattle by Nick Styant-Browne of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro and Sim Osborn, managing partner of Osborn Machler, seeks to represent and to recover money lost for all those who received and were charged for unsolicited goods from Scholastic in the United States. More information is available, and a way to join in on the lawsuit, at Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro’s website.

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“Maybe so, say Frey’s fiercest critics [Keller adds]. But people didn’t buy the book for its literary delights; they bought it because they thought it was the gospel truth, plain and simple. Really? The bookstores are full of books just bursting with firm, indisputable, unassailable, irrefutable truths. Those books don’t sell the millions of copies that Frey’s did.”

Meanwhile, Patti Davis (right) tells Newsweek web readers she knows what Frey’s going through, sort of, because she wrote a novel everybody was sure had to be real. “Very few writers hit it out of the ballpark the first time,” she says. “James Frey did. I was in awe of the book as a writer, and grateful for it as a recovered drug addict…No one could have made up what he wrote.” She’s still not convinced all this hoopla over the distortions is necessary: “I don’t care how many days Frey did or did not spend in jail. I care that he keeps writing with a heart that doesn’t hold back.”

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Miller (who’s also Salon’s Books Editor) has decided to extend her critical forays into book format. In a pre-empt, Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch bought her “autobiographical literary criticism” of THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, appropriately called THE MAGICIAN’S BOOK. The pitch goes on to call it “the elusive power of story and magic that makes you fall in love with any book,” which sounds fun but seems a rather flimsy construct at first glance.

Then again, I’m more amused in the face of anonymous literary agent Miss Snark’s recent rant about book reviewers/editors doubling as authors, even going so far as to create a mock conversation:

Ring! Ring!

Editor: Hello

Miss Snark: I have a delicous new novel from a fresh voice. You’ll love it, I know cause you love novels about pigs that fly and live on Park Avenue and perambulate through the park.

Editor: Well…

Miss Snark: oh, and I should also mention, he’s the chief book reviewer for Time Magazine.

Editor: We’ll take world rights for six figures, Alex.

Not that she was actually talking about Lev Grossman, of course…

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As a result, Blue Apple Books won’t publish Ziefert’s book, set for release in April, after all. Which would be all noble and altruistic but for the fact that Ziefert, a longtime children’s book writer whose books have been published by HarperCollins Random House, Simon & Schuster and Houghton Mifflin, runs Blue Apple Books.

The book was taken off the publishing schedule in enough time so that only advance copies were made available to reviewers, but don’t expect Kirkus to review the book anytime soon. “…[T]here’s no point now,” Breen said. “I don’t know whether to be outraged, mystified or what. Part of me is insulted because those of us in this business know our books. It was because I knew the book that I noticed something was wrong.”

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So when he sent in that application to join the neo-Nazi organization, and when he became a featured broadcaster on their online radio show, he was just doing research. And then he claimed to have outed himself to Fairleigh Dickinson’s administration as a “literary experiment,” after which he dropped out of the little Hitler club. Except that almost everybody, from the academics to the white supremacists, wants to go on record as being convinced that Pluss is a self-published nutcase rather than a scholar with a radical methodology. Miriam Burstein, an English professor at SUNY-Brockport, offers one of the more measured responses, suggesting merely that Pluss’ rationalizations for his behavior demonstrate “a lower-division undergraduate’s understanding of Romantic authorship.” Pluss recently did an interview with Inside Higher Ed where he claimed his activities were worthwhile because “his findings were significant.” So what were they?

“There is nothing romantic about putting on a Nazi uniform and playing Third Reich. That ended in 1945. There are connections between white power groups that reach far and wide, and include a sort of spider web across America—skinhead groups, National Socialist groups that don’t use uniforms, and so forth.”

Well, thanks for clearing that up, Jacques; some of us might have been a bit confused.

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“It is important that the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) classifies books in its collection in a way that reflects the community’s expectations. When BPL learned of public and publishing industry concerns of the discrepancies in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, we felt it necessary to react in a way that would assure Brooklyn’s library users that the information they want and need is easily available and accessible within a clear and truthful classification system.”

Ahhhh, but what’re they going to do about Nasdijj?

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Other highlights included Frey constantly stroking his beard and apologizing to readers after an angry blonde woman directed her utter fury at him, the Poynter Institute guy saying “losing your mojo” with a straight face, and Frank Rich continuing to be excessively jolly.

Though Nan Talese didn’t figure in the clip I saw, she stayed on for the “After the Show” proceedings, still claiming that she first learned of Frey’s fabrications when everyone else did. But Slate‘s Timothy Noah has good reason to believe that at the very least, Talese was stretching the truth, pointing to a Minneapolis Star-Tribune article from 2003 where Talese said almost the same thing to Deborah Caufield Rybak about A MILLION LITTLE PIECES ans she would to Oprah nearly 3 years later. Even more telling, Talese even brings up the idea of a disclaimer: “It’s a total slip-up that we didn’t have a disclaimer page,” she told the Star Trib. “I’m embarrassed.”

Said embarrassment didn’t just carry over, it was replaced by peer praise in a Friday morning meeting described in today’s WSJ Freygate piece where Talese got a standing ovation, a call of support from CEO Peter Olson and a whole lotta email. But Talese is staying visible; the two key players who have yet to utter a single peep are Frey’s editor Sean McDonald and especially his agent Kassie Evashevski (who remains at “no comment” in this piece, as in every other.) One might start to wonder if either, or both, are pulling a metaphorical Jason Epstein on Frey’s Judy Miller…)

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Alison Pace, author of IF ANDY WARHOL HAD A GIRLFRIEND, got tired of watching after a while: “as I sat watching Frey looking very much like a kicked puppy, I just didn’t want to hear it anymore. I thought Oprah was cruel to him and the fact that later she tied it up in a “now, James, you’ll grow,” bow doesn’t really make that okay. I watched but I thought the whole charade of trotting out a cowed Frey to sit amongst those who had condemned him was less about anything else than it was about benefiting Oprah and aiding her in some face-saving from her earlier faux pas of implying truth didnt matter.”

The paperback edition of John Falk’s HELLO TO ALL THAT is uncomfortably proclaimed to be “in the tradition of A MILLION LITTLE PIECES” and he explores this in an essay at Beatrice.com (which, of course, is my co-Galleycatter’s main site): “memoirs are not official history. They are not even official biographies because if a fact or event isn’t relevant to the story structure, it doesn’t belong in a memoir. It is these omissions and the imposition of a literary style that makes memoirs entertaining reading but imperfect records. Who the hell can remember dialogue verbatim from when they were five? However, at the end of the day, if you’re cooking the facts, you’re undermining your story. If you’re not aiming for the truth, you’re undermining the initial reason you first put pen to paper, that initial inspiration that you had something important, compelling to say.”

Deanna Stillman, in a recent entry on the Huffington Post, isn’t buying any of this blase attitude: “Instead of casting Frey as some sort of Abu Ghraib-like loose cannon, his publisher and agent should explain their role in this mischagas. But until that happens, well, to paraphrase the tattoo on Frey’s arm – “Fuck the bullshit, it’s time to throw up.”

And casting an eye around the major newspapers, the LAT’s Tim Rutten, the Boston Globe’s David Mehegan and about half the available space of the NYT’s arts section (what with an interview with “anti-Frey” Martha Sherrill, David Carr’s treatise on truthiness and Sara Ivry’s look at how this benefits Court TV) devoted their energies to Frey-related materials.

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I had some questions of my own after reading Alexie’s essay online, so I shot him an email wondering what, if anything, he’d done after his initial efforts to alert Nasdijj’s publisher were rebuffed. “I was aware that Nasdijj had moved to other publishers, and that he was doing a little bit of the college speaking tour,” he replied. “But I’d given up on exposing him because nobody seemed to care. And whenever I try to expose these hoaxsters and exploiters, I’m the one who is accused of racism and imperialism and essentialism.” He adds that the Native artistic community has long been aware of frauds like Nasdijj, “but white folks don’t pay us much attention. A friend of mine emailed me to say that the whole thing made her sad because if an Indian of my success and influence can be ignored and/or dismissed by publishers then what does that say for less powerful Indians?” For that matter, he wonders, “Do you think the publishers might listen to me now?” It’s a legitimate question, and one without an obvious answer. After all, as Alexie points out, Ward Churchill remains a “leftist academic hero” despite the debunking of claims to Cherokee heritage because he’s “exactly the kind of Indian his white leftist academic compatriots want him to be [...] an Uncle Tomahawk with a vocabulary.”

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I mean, that’s just demented. Funny, but demented.

John Warner, author of FONDLING YOUR MUSE, offers up another humor-laden idea: he’ll be posting excerpts of MY FRIEND LEONARD and award $1000 to anyone “who can provide solid corroborating evidence that the incidents as described in the passage are true.” The offer’s sincere, though Warner suspects that the money might be safe…

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A lifelong fan of comedy, Kennedy took up the microphone after the sudden break-up of a close friendship. “I had a pal for a number of years. We used to talk about comedy and enjoy comedy together – then we stopped speaking. So I had a lack of the sort of thing I’d normally used to cheer me up.”

For Kennedy, working on her routine became a weapon in her battle with depression. “If you’re in a very negative place, comedy gives you something to do,” she says. “You think about comedy rather than jumping out of the window.”

Her big influences are Bill Hicks and Lenny Bruce, both of whom espoused her philosophy that “humour is a perfectly legitimate response to the horror of the world”.

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