My Friend James

This morning I got an e-mail from amazon.ca listing all the much-anticipated spring titles being released by various publishers in the next few months. I took the bait and headed on over to their site (mainly to research whether any of our titles made the list [none did]).

In my journey, though, I did come across something pretty interesting: James Frey's first novel, Bright Shiny Morning, has been published and will be in bookstores in May.

In case you don't remember, James Frey is the guy who caused a buttload of controversy in late 2005 with his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces. The book was a runaway bestseller until The Smoking Gun website revealed that parts of it were fabricated. The news resulted in an appearance by Frey on Oprah (who helped sell millions of copies of the book when she added it to her book club), during which she made him shed a few tears.

The publisher of the book, Doubleday, received a ton of complaints and ended up refunding readers over $2 million because they felt "cheated". Doubleday also pulled out of pending book deals with Frey, one of which included the publication of Bright Shiny Morning. In September 2007, Harper Collins struck a deal with Frey to publish the novel.

In other James Frey news, the NY Observer reported last week that he recently purchased the single-bedroom apartment next door to his current 3-bedroom dwelling for nearly $1 million.