The scandal around the memoir-turned- fake-recalled- from-bookstores memoir Love and Consequences continues to embarrass the book publishing industry. Writer Margaret Jones, who told her publisher she was a half-white, half-Native American raised by a black foster family in South Central L.A. and former Bloods gang member, was exposed as Margaret Seltzer, white private school graduate from Sherman Oaks, California. Her real (white) sister called the publisher Riverhead Books after reading a lengthy NY Times feature......

For the second year running, the Food Bank for New York City and the Lunchbox Fund of South Africa have enlisted over 100 celebrities in their holiday fundraiser. Boldface names like Kanye West, Elton John, Cameron Diaz, Mike Meyers, William Wegman and, um, Urban Outfitters, have created personalized, autographed lunchboxes that are now onsale via online auction. At Thursday night's kick-off event at Saatchi & Saatchi, a lunchbox by Michael Stipe was snatched up......

THEATER: This week marks your last chance to see TRUTH {the heart is a million little pieces above all things}, a one-man show by Mike Daisey that NYMetro declares “a delirious, brainy, hilarious, infuriating experience from which one emerges perversely hopeful.” The play follows the fictional and non-fictional stories of James Frey's self-destruction, the sordid and shocking tale of J.T. LeRoy, and Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet whose great works were written by warring multiple......

The scandal is a week old now - Kaavya Viswanathan is the Harvard sophomore who plagiarized passages of her debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life from two of author Megan McCafferty's books. But boy, what a week it's been, and everyone (for better or worse) is still talking about it. First, The Crimson broke the story about Viswanathan's prolific cribbing from McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings (while......

The publishing world is in a tizzy over rising novelist's Kaavya Viswanathan's admission that she unintentionally copied passages from books by Megan McCafferty in order to write, How Opal Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, about an ambitious NJ teen who wants to get into Harvard. Viswanathan, just featured earlier in a rather glowing NY Times article about being a Harvard student with a $500,000 two-book deal at Little, Brown, was exposed by......

New York Press makes it's annual attempt at relevancy this week with it's list of the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers. Sigh. We always really want to like this list, but it just never quite lives up to our hopes. They get some good bits in there ("Sometimes it’s funny when a Jewish-American named Larry gets into wacky adventures due to being stubborn and shortsighted. Unfortunately, Larry Silverstein is no Larry David.") but they......

Todd Zuniga, Opium Magazine...

Josh Horowitz, Writer/Television Producer...

Yesterday, Oprah Winfrey admitted she made a mistake (gasp!) and took James Frey and his publisher, Nan A. Talese, to task for making her look foolish on her show. Yes, Oprah defended the readers' right to know if something peddled as truth is false, but mainly, Oprah was ashamed that she had embarrassed herself by defending A Million Little Pieces. [You can order the tape and/or transcript that amazing hour of televsion here.] Gothamist then......

- Father gets answers to life's big questions (like is dinosaur poo like hummus) for his six year old - The mother of a 2 year old who died in their apartment was arrested for the child's death - cocaine was found in the baby's room - The Village Voice points out why Oprah listened to the Smoking Gun in the end about James Frey - The story about the little girl strangled by......

Wow, Gothamist takes a break to re-read The Chronicle of Narnia and suddenly contemporary literature is rocked! The big stories: The Smoking Gun's expose on bestselling author James Frey's lie-laden memoir (and Oprah book), A Million Little Pieces, and the NY Times'investigation in JT Leroy, revealing he doesn't quite exist! Next, we'll find out JK Rowling is a marketing scheme cooked up by the British government! The Smoking Gun's article about Frey's lies seems so......

James Frey, Memoirist...

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's Warner Bros.-based production company, Plan B, just bought the rights (Variety.com - registration required) to James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Michael Fleming writes, "The memoir opens as Frey finds himself aboard a Chicago-bound plane, missing four teeth and with a hole in his face, unable to remember how he got that way. Strung out on booze and crack at age 23, and wanted by authorities in three states,......