The lure of made-up memoirs: Tuesday’s revelation that a critically acclaimed memoir of gang life in South Los Angeles was an elaborate hoax raises troubling questions about the economics of American publishing, about our collective deference to victims and about the paucity of real literature based on our most urgent urban experiences. [LA Times]
Bill Heinz Was a Writer to Relish: In 1946, Damon Runyon was dying of throat cancer and could scarcely speak. A magazine editor asked him who, in his opinion, was the best young writer in New York. Runyon scrawled the name W.C. Heinz on a cocktail napkin and passed it to him. He had underlined Heinz’s name three times. [WSJ]
Riverhead Books announced yesterday that it is recalling all copies of Margaret Jones’s “Love and Consequences,” a supposed memoir about growing up among gangs in South Central Los Angeles that turns out to be fictional. 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. [NY Sun]
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