What's the one thing nearly every fake memoir scandal seems to have in common? From James Frey to Angel at the Fence, if a story is bullshit, chances are Oprah was there first.

After seeing the release of his memoir cancelled, Herman Rosenblat apologized, saying he lied about a girl tossing apples over the fence of his concentration camp because he wanted "to bring happiness to people."

Byron Crawford, one of the best hip hop bloggers out there and also a raging homophobe and horny bastard, was very impressed by fake author Margaret Seltzer's outfit and demeanor in her video rendition of fantastic tales from the hood. He'd like to get to know her better. "You know who has two thumbs and lurves…

Derek Khan is living the high life now in Dubai, having put his past as a jewelry-pinching celebrity stylist behind him. He has recaptured some of his past glory, now appearing as a "commentator and makeover specialist" on satellite TV and in magazines like OK! Middle East. But in between Khan's come-up and his…

Fabricating author Ben Mezrich isn't another Margaret Seltzer or James Frey, instead he's part of a far more serious deception. It has emerged that Mezrich invented most of the card-sharking characters in his supposed "real-life" biography, Bringing Down The House, the basis for the hit movie 21. He also appears to…

So Hillary Clinton has been going around saying that she is qualified to be president of everyone in part because she was shot at in Bosnia once, in 1996. CBS News dug up their original story from that Bosnia trip, and it turns out the "sniper fire" was actually a little girl, with a flower. Some card spliced the…

We finally got around to reading the fake gang memoir, Margaret Seltzer's Love and Consequences. While we agree with the NYT's Michiko Kakutani's assesment ("self-consciously novelistic"), we thought there was one line worth sharing: "He leaned over and gently kissed me... his lips tasted like Olde English and chronic…

The New Yorker just published a ridiculous, hand-wavy essay questioning the importance of factual truth in history and providing some sliver of refuge to fake memoirists like Margaret Seltzer even as it badmouths them. The essay is littered with questions, and they all have the sort of "everything is relative, man"…

The fake memoirist/non-gang member's believers included Inga Muscio, friend and feminist author of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. Muscio introducted Seltzer to her agent, which resulted in the deal for Seltzer's Love and Consequences. Seltzer is either a bit crazy, or a total Method actor, because "everyone who…

"To discredit Love and Consequences... allows Americans the luxury of continuing to ignore the problems the book represents, or at best of waiting for another voice to bring it to our attention. Every memoir or autobiography is an individual's fashioning of his or her life, directed toward that individual's conception…

The NYT's Motoko Rich helpfully rounds up all the offenders in the fake-memoir trend. Valley Girl gang-pretender Margaret Seltzer, James Frey, and Laura Albert (aka JT Leroy) are only the tip of the iceberg: "The history of literary fakers stretches far, far back, at least to the 19th century, when a slave narrative…

Riverhead Books editor Sarah McGrath, who shepherded the fake memoir from Margaret Seltzer (left), bought a spectacularly inaccurate memoir once before. In 2006, Scribner canceled McGrath's reported $900,000 deal to buy a memoir from fashion reporter Emily Davies. Women's Wear Daily had publicly fact-checked Davies'…

Now that lying author Margaret Seltzer has made the New York Times look like useful idiots for printing a fawning profile of her in which she spouted her stock lies about her ties to the hood, the paper is pushing for some changes. Standards Editor Craig Whitney emails the newsroom today that they shouldn't run any…

Lying writer James Frey will be damned if he is going to miss an opportunity to milk literary deception for all it's worth, so he's already launched a new publicity campaign, less than 48 hours after newb lying writer Margaret Seltzer got the whole country talking about fake autobiographers again. Of course it's…

"Her senior farewell in the 1992 Campbell Hall yearbook reads, 'To my family — I love you all so much, thank you for everything.' Meanwhile, her high school friends call her 'Pegatha,' their 'Skittle supplier' whose hardest drug consumed was 'vanilla coffee for finals.'" [P6]

Hey, reporters out there: here's a good line you can use when those pesky fact-checkers mess with your most colorful and fabricated quotes. Nan Talese, who published James Frey's bogus A Million Little Pieces, has weighed in on the latest literary scandal: "I don't think there is any way you can fact-check every…

Before she was exposed as a well-off suburban girl rather than a hardscrabble gangster, lying memoirist Margaret Seltzer claimed to have set up a "foundation" called International Brother/SisterHood, either to support her backstory, preemptively redeem herself or maybe just somehow swindle more money. (Thanks to…

"Whenever a case like this comes to light, someone asks: Why don't publishers fact-check their books? The basic answer is that it's not practical. Publishers release hundreds of books each year, most of them several hundred pages long. A publisher simply can't afford to fact-check all of those books to the standards…