That is to say, Motoko Rich of the New York Times has a section-fronting article on The Kindly Ones today, and that's just the icing: Michiko Kakutani slammed the title in the same space last week, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda raved about it in the Daily Beast, and the whole hullabaloo is a repeat of basically identical controversies in Britain, Germany and originally in France, where it the novel made its debut three years ago.

Kindly Ones involves brutally graphic Holocaust memories — gassings, beatings, worse — of an unrepentant former SS officer, along with his raw sexual fantasies. Littell, an English-speaking American, wrote the book in French. One French critic called it the "new War And Peace." Kakutani: "a pointless compilation of atrocities;" Korda: A work of "astonishing brutality, originality, and force."

If the debate over what Kakutani called an "odious stunt" sounds familiar, that might be because Jonathan Burnham, the publisher who brought the book to the U.S., presided over a similar hubub when HarperCollins bought James Frey's post-fabrication novel, Bright Shiny Morning.

If Burnham is building a reputation among some as a sensationalist, at least he's showing the especially-troubled book industry how to take the right sorts of risks — and in so doing to better compete for consumer attention, as basically every other form of traditional media has learned to do — along the way.

(Pic of Littell by AFP via Getty)

Ira Silverberg, the fun-loving literary agent who organized this event on behalf of the CLMP, thanked everyone for showing up to support the organization. The CLMP exists to help small presses and lit mags at a time of unprecedented "conglomeration in book publishing," he informed us.

Jonathan Burnham—former Miramax Books honcho!—nodded sagely.

Then Ira introduced the evening's MC, his husband Bob Morris, who has that column in the Times about being a crotchety gay who is annoyed by email and babies and stuff. Bob in turn introduced the bee's judge, OED editor Jesse Sheidlower, who is the very definition of geek hot.

"Jesse is the top in this relationship," Bob told us, in what was to be the first of many adorably supergay, but sort of eldergay, double-entendres of the evening.

Seriously, imagine an elementary school spelling bee crossed with some sort of outtake scene from "Tales of The City" and there you go.

Jonathan Burnham was first up. He aced "pergola." Easy! Especially because he is British.

Things were about to get much tougher, though. The author Colin Channer misspelled "millennium." Then Michael Cunningham ("one of the tallest and most beautiful men in this room, and also he won a Pulitzer!" per Bob) also misspelled millennium. Paula Froelich was up next, and she flubbed millennium too! This, however, might have been hara-kiri: "That's how we spell it at Page Six," she told the audience, and scampered out the door with her date. (He was cute.)

Alex Kuczynski and "Cancer Vixen" author Marisa Marchetto were both eliminated by the word "cappuccino."

"Do you think I need some Botox, Alex?" Marisa asked, before her losing turn. "Leave her alone, she's disgraced," Bob chided. Indeed!

For the rest of the evening, Alex sat in the losers' area, complaining loudly that the other contestants' words were too easy and generally heckling. Occasionally she would get up to bring her fellow losers fresh rounds of drinks. "I just got a drink for Michael Cunningham," she told me starstruckly as she breezed by in a cloud of delicious perfume.

Next to me, New York's Jesse Oxfeld observed that Alex smelled amazing. I wondered aloud what her perfume was. "Money," Jesse said, and then went back to caressing his handheld device.

It's true, Alex does have an awful lot of money. But author Meg Wolitzer has the title of CLMP Spelling Bee reigning champion, and what's really more important?

I bought Frey's book, before The Smoking Gun debunked so much of it, and I liked it. I'm a sucker for confessions. (Hey, even Gawker loved him on first sight, back in January of 2003.) I love writers who specialize in wide-open honesty; it's sort of my favorite thing, actually. My favorite writers—Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Jonathan Ames, David Sedaris, Cookie Mueller, Sylvia Plath, Colette, Mary Gaitskill, Phoebe Gloeckner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Dawn Powell—are all expert confessors.

Oh, and here are the people whose confessions generally rub me the wrong way: Chuck Klosterman, Neal Pollack, Nick Hornby, Steve Almond, Julie Powell, Elizabeth Gilbert, Stephanie Klein. The people whose confessions often reek of bragging, even when—especially when—the bragging is along the lines of "look how disgusting/uncool/modest/bad at relationships I am." Or: "look at what a lame person I used to be."

But I liked A Million Little Pieces specifically because James Frey seemed to eschew that kind of self-mythologizing. There was something about the book that just felt... honest. True. Which means, I guess, that Frey is a very talented writer? Or maybe just a very, very talented liar.

Frey didn't just pull an Augusten Burroughs—it's not like the lies were "discrepancies" attributable to "we all have our own personal truths," though he did use nearly that exact lame line. He blatantly wrote about factual things that never occurred as if they'd happened to him, and in doing so, made his readers feel sympathy and vicarious pain. He toyed with our emotions, and when we found out we'd been lied to, we felt betrayed. I did, at least—and, hey, Oprah did! And everyone who said, "well, it's still a really well-written book" seriously has something wrong with them.

But apparently it's a big so-what. Our culture isn't into consequences. Shame is the new fame. What yesterday's news means is that James Frey's career will continue, and as it does, the story of the fraud he perpetrated on four million readers will drift further and further down the page in any profile written about him, until it's in the last paragraph, until it's in the last line, until it's not there at all.

George Saunders, in an essay about how reading Johnny Tremain changed his life, wrote:

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one. False prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility, or something more diabolical; the process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and most importantly, tells us what we really think.

You know that Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Caitlin Upton, the one who gave a retarded answer to a stupid question and became an instant YouTube sensation? Last week, the wire services were full of pictures of her, going to fashion shows and parties. She's famous now. In a few more weeks, no one will remember what she originally became famous for. They'll only know that they know her name.

With Miramax Books in turmoil in 2005, it surprised no one that founding publisher Jonathan Burnham decided to go his own way. But most expected him to spin off one of those personality-based imprints (like Jonathan Karp's Warner Twelve). Instead he became publisher of the flagship division at HarperCollins, a many-tentacled behemoth better known for celebrity tell-alls than high literature. So what's he doing under the same Murdochian tent as Judith Regan? Making Harper more respectable, for one thing.

That little bit about Jonathan Burnham in this week's NY Mag is egregious. Michael Cader only linked to it and mentioned the books in Pub Lunch, but he didn't point out the ridiculousness of describing and dismissing HarperCollins as a house that was primarily known for celeb books, and needing Jonathan to pull it out of the gutter. With editors like Terry Karten, Hugh Van Dusen, and until he retired, Larry Ashmead (just to name a few, and putting aside Harper's illustrious but more distant past), Harper has published-since the 80-s and to the present-authors such as Louise Erdrich, Isabel Allende, Thomas Moore, Howard Zinn, Michael Dorris, Vikram Seth, Barbara Kingsolver, Simon Winchester, FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE by Jacques Barzun (a NBA finalist), and Herbert Bix's HIROHITO AND THE MAKING OF MODERN JAPAN, which won a NBCC and a Pulitzer Prize. And these are just the ones I can remember, and none of them had a thing to do with Jonathan Burnham. Frankly, if he has any class at all, he'll write a letter to NY Mag himself to correct the record-I mean, these are his editors that NY Mag has insulted.

Best In Books [NYMag]