Follow this link to read a Byliner excerpt from his book, a section about a journalist caught fabricating chunks of his memoir. It arrived as a timely piece of writing after Jonah Lehrer‘s recent scandal.

Press play to listen, but we’ve included quotes from the interview below: “Even though we seem to be able to unmask journalistic frauds with greater and greater regularity, is that really improving journalism at all? That’s a funny thing that’s happening. Journalism is self-policing itself probably better than ever, but meanwhile, journalism isn’t getting any better for all of that.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To mark the event, the band is playing a show in Los Angeles on June 22 at the El Rey. The group includes authors Scott Turow, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson, and James McBride, among others.

On his guest DJ set on KCRW, Turow explained how the band came together: “Well the band was brought together by the late and greatly beloved, Kathi Goldmark, who was an author’s escort in San Francisco. Kathy, who is one of the most fun loving people that’s ever walked this planet, realized that she had a lot of authors she was squaring around who loved rock music and she put together a sort of cover band of writers and it all came together when Stephen King agreed that he would do it.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Goldmark (pictured, via) founded the Rock Bottom Remainders, a literary rock band that toured the country with a rotating line-up of bestselling authors (including The Shining novelist Stephen King, Tuesdays with Morrie writer Mitch Albom and The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan). Goldmark published both fiction and nonfiction books, contributing to several anthologies as well.

Here’s more from The New York Times: ”[Goldmark], herself, a country rock musician, she made a day job of running a business taking authors around San Francisco when they came to do book tours. Ms. [Amy] Tan said that of all the jobs Ms. Goldmark held — author, columnist, publishing consultant, radio and music producer, songwriter — the word that best summed her up was ‘connector.’”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Byliner Fiction will feature everything from short stories to novellas. Here’s more from the release: “We are beginning to build a structured archive on Byliner.com of great short fiction from writers such as Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Paul Theroux, and Stewart O’Nan.”

Byliner will release Tan’s story, priced at $2.99, on December 5th. Readers can find it in the Amazon Kindle Singles store, at BarnesAndNoble.com, as a Quick Read in Apple’s iBook store and in the Google eBookstore. According to the company, this will be Tan’s first fiction publication in six years. Tan’s new novel, The Valley of Amazement, will be published by HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In the U.S., Ecco publisher Daniel Halpern negotiated with Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency president Sandra Dijkstra. In Canada, Harper Canada publisher Iris Tupholme ironed out a contract with Westwood Creative Artists literary agent John Pearce.

Tan described her book in the release: “A painting called the ‘Valley of Amazement’ is passed along through three generations of women of the same family. Despite vast differences in their upbringing, culture and circumstances, each of the women is drawn to discover the meaning of the painting and the unknown histories of their mothers.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To find out more about the event, GalleyCat caught up with Stephen Elliott, the founder of the online literary site, The Rumpus. “Sometimes, especially in recent times, I’ll be hanging out with a bunch of writers or publishing people, and they’re so sad. For writers that not unusual. As a group we’re generally dissatisfied and the failing bookstores and magazines is just one more peg to hang that coat on. That has nothing to do with the state of the economy or how many books we’ve sold. It’s just part of our makeup and it’s probably one of the things that drives many of us to write,” Elliott explained.

“We think we’ll publish a book and it will make us happy. We’ve always thought that and it’s never been true … From the beginning The Rumpus has been a boost for everyone that cares about good books. One of our mottos is ‘Three celebrations for every complaint … We wanted to have a really positive event, do something fun, cheer everybody up if they’re feeling down, and celebrate celebrating if they’re not.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

But when Reuters tried to find out what the novel was about, Tan got cagey. “I never talk about what a new book is about as it will leave me,” Tan explained. “There is a story in Chinese where a man goes to a magical place and is overwhelmed by the beauty and the peace. He has to leave and they tell him that if he tells anyone where this place is he will never find it again. That is the metaphor for writing. You are in a secret place and discovering it but once you tell people it is gone.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.