Best Of New Orleans Blog

Thousands might have waited with baited breath for the liar’s latest release

B. DALTON BOOKSELLERS, EVERYWHERE, USA— Today, thousands — er, probably tens — of people may have waited in line to receive their copy of James Frey’s newest big fat lie, Bright Shiny Morning — scheduled to be released today. (I don’t really know; I wouldn’t be caught dead in that line.) In an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of the 30-to-35-year-old male skateboarders and potheads who listed A Million Tiny Pieces — a lame-ass story about drug addiction recovery that he later admitted was bogus — on their myspace profile under their book “interests,” the author has written a new “novel,” using the word “shiny” as a nifty substitute for what us average readers would normally read as Bright “Sunny” Morning.

Poets and Writers magazine reports that “Neither [the agent] nor the publisher wanted the book to be reviewed online months before publication,” according to Frey’s agent. “This strategy is not an embargo,” the director of publicity at HarperCollins told PW. But perhaps it’s a new strategy wherein they’re hoping sheer suspense will compel his handful of devoted fans to buy the book without any information about the plot or context of the novel whatsoever ahead of time. If you care, the book is available online at Amazon.com. It’s apparently so great people already bought and posted several used copies online so others can enjoy Bright Shiny Morning even faster, and cheaper. Janet Maslin even wrote a review of the book for the New York Times in a baby voice so his fans could understand how truly important his bright shining moment really is.

The consciously itinerant writers of the Beat literary movement chose a bohemian lifestyle that celebrated unfettered movement at a time when the whole country was nesting, separating themselves violently from the stultifying return-to-normal culture of the postwar economic boom and its white picket fences bought with GI loans. While the Kerouacs and Corsos were scribbling the free-form screeds that would have them celebrated as maverick revolutionaries striking blows to literary and social structure, wives and girlfriends - more often than not highly literate Radcliffe and Barnard grads who put their own manuscripts aside - brewed the espresso and typed the chapbooks. (more…)

Public relations may be an art to some people, but its materials don’t often end up in museums or thick coffeetable books.

Here’s a remarkable exception.

In one of the first publicly funded municipal promotional efforts, the city of New Orleans commissioned photographer Theodore Lilienthal to survey the city and send the prints to the Paris World Exhibition in 1867. He took pictures of buildings, sites of commerce, paddlewheel boats on the docks, neighborhoods, etc. The collection of 150 large-sized prints presented an excellent portrait of New Orleans. (more…)