A publisher shows respect for readers in the wake of another scandal
Somebody at Riverhead Books clearly made a disastrous blunder on the way to the publication of Love and Consequences, a memoir of gang life that has been exposed as a fake. But Riverhead’s parent company, Penguin Group USA, deserves praise for announcing that it would recall all copies of the book promptly. Penguin acted responsibly, professionally and in a way that shows respect for readers by moving swiftly to remove the book from shelves and to cancel author Margaret Seltzer’s book tour. Nobody wants more publishing scandals to erupt, but when they do, this is the way to handle them www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/books/04fake.html.
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
Fabricated tale of gang life reaffirms the need to question “memoirs” that don’t make sense
For more than a year, this site has been raising questions about Ishmael Beah’s purported memoir of two years as a child solider, A Long Way Gone, that have received unsatisfactory responses from the author and his publisher. Why do critics, journalists and you, the reader, need to keep challenging aspects of personal accounts that don’t make sense?
One answer is implicit in a story in today’s New York Times about a young writer’s confession that she made up Love and Consequences, a widely praised book billed as a “memoir” of her life as a drug-runner for the Bloods: Publishers are doing too little to verify the authenticity of their books www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/books/04fake.html. Book publishers have never done – nor can they be expected to do – the exhaustive fact-checking that occurs at The New Yorker. But the Times’s story shows that they sometimes don’t take the much more basic steps that would be reasonable.
Love and Consequences was reportedly exposed as a fraud by a call to the publisher, Riverhead Books, from a sister of the author, Margaret Seltzer, who used the pen name of Margaret B. Jones. Riverhead is a unit of the Penguin Group USA, one of the world’s largest publishers. It seems that all an editor would have to do to uncover problems with this book would have been to require the writer to provide the telephone numbers of a few immediate-family members, then call those people.
[The Penguin Group has recalled all copies of Love and Consequences, and One-Minute Book Reviews will comment on the recall in a post later today.]
Just offhand, how many bookstores do you think would be brave enough to steer people to the Delete Key Awards, the only literary prizes in America that say, “Sometimes you need to take your anti-nausea medication before you head for the fiction aisle”? Not many, eh? And of those, how many might be really great world-class places? Right, we’re looking at negative numbers here.
Or so I thought until I noticed that One-Minute Book Reviews was getting a lot of traffic from the blog by Brockman for Powell’s, that Ferrari of bookstores in Portland, Oregon. I clicked on the incoming link www.powells.com/blog/?author=20
to its blog and read this:
“Arguably the second-best online literary award after the TOB’s Rooster [co-sponsored by Powell’s] is the 2008 Delete Key Awards for ‘the year’s worst writing in books,’ awarded by the One-Minute Book Reviews blog.
And the nominees are:”
This was followed, incredibly, by 11 links to One-Minute Book Reviews, one to the overall shortlist and one to each post that had a sample of a finalist’s bad writing.
Wow, do they believe in free speech at Powell’s.
Somebody there might have seen a mention of the awards Bookslut www.bookslut.com or Ceri Radford’s book blog for the Telegraph in the U.K. blogs.telegraph.co.uk/arts/ceriradford/feb08/dletekeyawardsfinalists.htm. So a big thank-you to them, too. And between all of them and others the Delete Key shortlist post ended up as the No. 1 Entertainment post on the Yahoo “Buzz” page for a while. (Alas, that “while” was so short, I can’t even seem to link to it now.) That meant that for at least 15 seconds on Yahoo Buzz, bad books ranked ahead of a contest called “Win a Date With Scarlett Johansson.”
What an amazing day.
Thank you, everybody.
(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
