Notorious Author gets $1.5 Mil for New Book

[3113]

You are shitting me! I guess both publishers and readers can forgive, but if this article is right, it's a *bad book*!

If they want bad books, I'll be happy to write one and I'll only charge them $500,000 for it. Heck, I'll write a mediocre one for $250,000--as I know a really bad one takes so much hard work that a writer needs to charge upwards of a million for it.

Edited Book Review from the L.A. Times:

"Bright Shiny Morning" is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: He's got chutzpah. Two and a half years after he was eviscerated by Oprah Winfrey for exaggerating many of the incidents in his now-discredited memoir "A Million Little Pieces," he's back with this book, which aims to be the big novel about Los Angeles, a panoramic look at the city that seeks to tell us who we are and how we live.

Clearly, HarperCollins, Frey's publisher, expects a lot from this book; it reportedly paid a million and a half dollars for it. You can interpret that in a few ways: as a shrewd business decision (as of this writing, the novel is No. 52 at Amazon.com) or as yet another symbol of a book industry in crisis, with publishers grasping at whatever straws they can to manufacture buzz. Ultimately, though, it is still what's on the page that matters, and "Bright Shiny Morning" is an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining.

Written as an Altman-esque collage, it follows several parallel story lines that never coalesce......

Esperanza, a Chicana from East L.A., forgoes a college scholarship after being embarrassed at a high school graduation party over the size of her thighs. Eventually she takes a job as a maid for a tyrannical white woman in Pasadena, only to fall in love with the woman's son. That's nothing compared to the story of Dylan and Maddie, two crazy kids from Ohio...Maddie turns to Dylan and says: "...I think that I want to be an actress."

"An actress?" he asks.

"Yeah, I want to be a movie star."

How do we reckon with a novel in which the desire to become an actress is treated as original and organic, in which the only Mexican American character is a maid?How do we reckon with a book in which the city is flat and lifeless as a stage set, in which Frey uses broad generalizations ("Thirty-thousand Persians fleeing the rule of the ayatollahs. One-hundred and twenty-five thousand Armenians escaping Turkish genocide. Forty-thousand Laotians avoiding minefields. Seventy-five thousand Thais none in Bangkok sex shows.") to try to animate what his imagination cannot?

Yes, this is Los Angeles, in the way a cheap Hollywood movie is Los Angeles: superficial, a collection of loose impressions that don't add up. Whatever else his failings as a writer, Frey was once able to move his readers; how else do we explain the success of "A Million Little Pieces"? It's just one of the ironies of this new book that his fictionalized memoir is a better novel than "Bright Shiny Morning" could ever hope to be.

 

[sr71plt]

Copyright infringement.

 

[3113]

Copyright infringement.

You mean what I quoted? I didn't quote the entire article and I gave the website. So. Not copyright infringement. Quoting.

 

[rgraham666]

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. - P. T. Barnum.

Smart guy, P.T.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. - P. T. Barnum.

Smart guy, P.T.

Good taste and scruples are a curse, I tell you!

 

[jomar]

How do I get his agent to take me on? I can write bad stories. Really.

 

[rgraham666]

Good taste and scruples are a curse, I tell you!

There are many times I wish I was a psychopath as well. Sigh.

 

[john-the-author]

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. - P. T. Barnum.

Smart guy, P.T.

And a Unitarian.

 

[R. Richard]

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. - P. T. Barnum.

Smart guy, P.T.

The quote is one of Henry Louis Mencken's quotes.

 

[emap]

People will buy it though, they won't bother reading any reviews. They will spot it in the store and go hey I loved the last one he did and buy it, or read the excerpt on the back and go hey sounds interesting and buy it.

The publisher isn't stupid, if a person writes a bestseller, their next book will sell, not because it's good bad or holy crap this sucks, it will sell. People are for the most part, little better than a 4 year old. Shove something in their face that was made by someone they liked, they will buy it.

 

[trysail]

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. - P. T. Barnum.

The quote is one of Henry Louis Mencken's quotes.

Praise the Lord! Thank heavens that somebody on a website called "Literotica" recognized that as one of H. L. Mencken's signature quotations.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste or intelligence of the American public."

http://www.mencken.org​