Here is a good one.
What do these people have in common :
Dick Cheney’s wife
Barbara Walters
Dan ‘Divinci Code ‘ Brown
Former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey
Lewis Scooter Libby
and Bill O’Reilly
Hmm. How about they all have published a book earlier in their career that they would probably do anything to make disappear but “thanks to the Web, literary fiascos may never again slip softly into the safety of oblivion. “Out of print” no longer means not available”.
Claire Zulkey exposes these ‘literary tragedies’ in her amusing piece for Radar.com “Read in the Face: From Barbara Walters to Dan Brown, the embarrassing books they wish we’d forget”
Highlights:
Jim McGreevey, the Governor of New Jersey who left office three months after admitting that he had had an extramarital affair with a male employee, wrote the introduction to “a beefcake-filled book” titled Swat Fitness in 2003
Dan ‘Divinci Code Brown wrote a dating advice bookâunder the name “Danielle” Brown called “187 Men to Avoid: A Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Women”
Bill O’Reilly’s novel “Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder” earned this review from Les Roberts in the Cleveland Plain Dealer “There’s not much suspense in this rambling tale…. Stilted dialogue, overwritten descriptions, far-fetched motivations, and jumps backward and forward in time make this novel tough going.”
This might be the beginning of a new genre or at least a new section at the book store.
I leave you with this from Ally Sheedy’s 1991 book of poems Yesterday I Saw the Sun
“I am open and vulnerable like a crack in cement”
Thanks to Books Inq. for the lead