James Frey returns - with a novel this time

Just as Ishmael Beah's best-seller about his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone, is being questioned for its authenticity [as reported on The First Post today], the disgraced writer James Frey, famously admonished on television by Oprah Winfrey for embellishing his drugs-and-prison memoir A Million Little Pieces, is back with a novel. And he’s boasting that the cover is being designed by the ultra-hip American artist Richard Prince – the first time the artist has agreed to design a book jacket for anyone other than himself.

Frey first came to public attention in 2005 when Oprah chose A Million Little Pieces for her book club, calling it "a gut-wrenching memoir that is raw and so real". But then The Smoking Gun, an investigative website, discovered that Frey had made up substantial parts of his story and overstated others. Winfrey dragged Frey back onto her show and publicly admonished him, saying she felt 'duped' by the author.

After the row blew up, Frey took himself and his family off to France where he reportedly wrote a screenplay for director Tony Scott about the Hell's Angels and began work on the novel, Bright Shiny Morning, set in Los Angeles. It was bought last September for a reported $1m by Jonathan Burnham of HarperCollins, and is due to be published in June.

As well as designing the cover, Richard Prince has apparently agreed to collaborate on a limited-edition companion book with Frey and photographer Terry Richardson. Frey claims it will incorporate excerpts from the novel with Richardson's photographs of LA and Prince's artwork. "Most of Terry's photos will be of girls, cars and guns," Frey told the New York Post. "It's going to be a really cool, interesting, edgy book."

If it doesn't turn out that way, readers can always take their complaint to court. In November 2007, a Manhattan judge decided in favour of readers who felt deceived by Frey's claims that A Million Little Pieces was a memoir and Frey’s publisher, Random House, set aside $2.35m for refunds. But only 1,729 readers have so far come forward to receive a refund for the book, which has sold more than 5m copies worldwide.