To add to Ron’s sea of questions, here’s another: what’s the response to Freygate going to be in other countries where his books are published? Well, at least in Britain, the attitude seems to be to bury their collective heads in the sand and hope the damn thing goes away, if the Bookseller is to be believed. Even though Doubleday’s going to add a disclaimer to A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, Frey’s UK publisher, John Murray said that “as the controversy has not hit the UK, it is feeling no pressure to make changes.”
Um, the controversy has not hit the UK? Really?
Meanwhile, Page Six tries to jumpstart a little more controversy by asking, “Is best-selling author Augusten Burroughs the next James Frey?” Funny, I always thought James Frey was the next Augusten Burroughs, the William S. Burroughs to Augusten’s Hubert Huncke, if you will… Oh, and Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum doesn’t come right out and call John Lott “the James Frey of statistics,” but you can bet he’d like to. Drum raises the challenge in response to an appearance on the NYT op-ed page by Lott, best recognized for his book More Guns, Less Crime…and then for pretending to be a woman so he defend himself on online discussion boards when his tendency to publish questionable scientific data began coming to light…