James Frey is originally from Cleveland. All four of his books, A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard, Bright Shiny Morning, and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, were international bestsellers.
"Frey returns with a novel so powerful it makes one wonder why he ever detoured into nonfiction. . . . A wildly talented storyteller, he lets it rip in Morning--a gripping epic about Los Angeles." -- People (four stars)"Bright Shiny Morning is un-put-downable, a real page-turner--in what may come to be known as the Frey tradition." -- Publishers Weekly"A sprawling, ambitious novel about Los Angeles, written with all the broad-stroke energy that was so irresistible to readers in A Million Little Pieces. By turns satirical, tense, and surprisingly touching, it is a portrait of a city onto which so many millions have projected so many dreams. . . . Compelling, cinematic. . . . It achieves the very essence of Los Angeles's fractured, unpredictable, loopy nature." -- Vanity Fair"A captivating urban kaleidoscope. . . . James Frey got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. . . . He became a furiously good storyteller." -- Janet Maslin, New York Times"A meaty social novel in the Tom Wolfe vein. . . . Its subject is Los Angeles from the bottom to the top, and unless you have ice in your veins you'll find its 501 pages of tiny print compulsively readable. I did." -- Bloomberg News"Relentlessly entertaining. . . . Bright Shiny Morning is a refreshingly archaic affair, an old-fashioned book written in an old-fashioned style. . . . It's reminiscent of one of Tom Wolfe's billion-footed beasts, but it's even more reminiscent of the socially conscious early 20th century naturalism of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck. Fittingly, Frey uses a hard-boiled, under-punctuated, Hemingway type of nonstyle that seems to growl." -- Time magazine"Frey's ambition may have been to write the definitive novel of L.A., to do for that city what Joyce did for Dublin, Dos Passos did for Manhattan or Durrell did for Alexandria. If so, he may have succeeded. . . . Bright Shiny Morning reads quickly, has great dialogue and some expertly paced dramatic moments, and teaches you more about L.A. than you ever knew." -- The Washington Post"If, despite the scandal, you loved A Million Little Pieces, you might want to devour Bright Shiny Morning. Like its author, it can be called many things, but never boring. Or timid." -- USA Today"A novel to reckon with, a tale of hopes and dreams and second chances. . . . A heartfelt homage to American dreamers, to the hope of re-invention and redemption. . . . Frey has given his novel a deeply spiritual subtext, and prayers, like dreams, rise up above the city in a kind of spiritual smog. . . . In James Frey's new world, we see what America has become--for better, for worse." -- The New Orleans Times-Picayune"Frey's sprawling narrative is brimming with energy, tragedy, and the endless travails and dreams of living in Los Angeles. . . . Frey is a novelist of compassion and unique vision. If there are second acts in American lives, he deserves one." -- Boston Globe
When James Frey imploded as a memoirist in 2006, many said his A Million Little Pieces should have been--and perhaps initially was--presented as a novel, and that Frey--a sometimes screenwriter--was, both by nature and design, a fiction writer. Bright Shiny Morning is his first official book of fiction. If it's not quite a novel, less believable in its way than his "augmented" memoir ever was, there's no doubt it's a work of Frey's imagination. Ironic, isn't it? Set in contemporary Los Angeles, Bright Shiny Morning is not a cohesive narrative but a compilation of vignettes of several characters (if this were a memoir, we'd call them "composites") who have come to the city to fulfill their dreams. Some examples: Dylan and Maddie, madly-in-love Midwestern runaways who survive through the kindness of near strangers; Esperanza, a Mexican-American maid tortured by a body that could have been drawn by R. Crumb; a group of drunks and junkies who create a community behind the shacks on Venice Beach; Amberton Parker, a hugely famous married movie star who is secretly--you guessed it--gay. Interspersed with these rotating portraits are random historical and statistical factoids (which better have been fact-checked, even if there is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink disclaimer up front: "Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable") about L.A.: that, for example, "approximately 2.7 million people live without health insurance" and "there are more than 12,000 people who describe their job as bill collector in the City of Los Angeles." Frey's intention, it seems, is to create an onomatopoetic jumble, a cacophony of facts and fiction, stats and stories, that replicate the contradictory nature of the place they describe. I expect, given the sharpness of the knives that some critics have out for Frey, that many will say the book flat out doesn't work. First off, there's that voice, the hyperbolic, breathless, run-on, word-repeating voice that was much better suited to a memoir (or even a novel) in which the hero was a hyperbolic, breathless alcoholic and drug addict. And then there's the frat-boy swagger that angered some readers of AMLP turning up here, too, so faux-cynical as to be naive: the gang father's attaboy about his five-year-old son's desire to be a cold-blooded killer, and the prurient, adolescent take on sex. (And couldn't someone have stopped him from exclaiming "woohoo" after some of his "fun" and "not fun" factoids?) Yet the guy has something: an energy, a drive, a relentlessness, maybe, that can pull readers along, past the voice, past the stock characters, past the cliches. Bright Shiny Morning is a train wreck of a novel, but it's un-put-downable, a real page-turner--in what may come to be known as the Frey tradition. Sara Nelson is the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
"Frey returns with a novel so powerful it makes one wonder why he ever detoured into nonfiction. . . . A wildly talented storyteller, he lets it rip in Morning--a gripping epic about Los Angeles." -- People (four stars)"Bright Shiny Morning is un-put-downable, a real page-turner--in what may come to be known as the Frey tradition." -- Publishers Weekly"A sprawling, ambitious novel about Los Angeles, written with all the broad-stroke energy that was so irresistible to readers in A Million Little Pieces. By turns satirical, tense, and surprisingly touching, it is a portrait of a city onto which so many millions have projected so many dreams. . . . Compelling, cinematic. . . . It achieves the very essence of Los Angeles's fractured, unpredictable, loopy nature." -- Vanity Fair"A captivating urban kaleidoscope. . . . James Frey got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. . . . He became a furiously good storyteller." -- Janet Maslin, New York Times"A meaty social novel in the Tom Wolfe vein. . . . Its subject is Los Angeles from the bottom to the top, and unless you have ice in your veins you'll find its 501 pages of tiny print compulsively readable. I did." -- Bloomberg News"Relentlessly entertaining. . . . Bright Shiny Morning is a refreshingly archaic affair, an old-fashioned book written in an old-fashioned style. . . . It's reminiscent of one of Tom Wolfe's billion-footed beasts, but it's even more reminiscent of the socially conscious early 20th century naturalism of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck. Fittingly, Frey uses a hard-boiled, under-punctuated, Hemingway type of nonstyle that seems to growl." -- Time magazine"Frey's ambition may have been to write the definitive novel of L.A., to do for that city what Joyce did for Dublin, Dos Passos did for Manhattan or Durrell did for Alexandria. If so, he may have succeeded. . . . Bright Shiny Morning reads quickly, has great dialogue and some expertly paced dramatic moments, and teaches you more about L.A. than you ever knew." -- The Washington Post"If, despite the scandal, you loved A Million Little Pieces, you might want to devour Bright Shiny Morning. Like its author, it can be called many things, but never boring. Or timid." -- USA Today"A novel to reckon with, a tale of hopes and dreams and second chances. . . . A heartfelt homage to American dreamers, to the hope of re-invention and redemption. . . . Frey has given his novel a deeply spiritual subtext, and prayers, like dreams, rise up above the city in a kind of spiritual smog. . . . In James Frey's new world, we see what America has become--for better, for worse." -- The New Orleans Times-Picayune"Frey's sprawling narrative is brimming with energy, tragedy, and the endless travails and dreams of living in Los Angeles. . . . Frey is a novelist of compassion and unique vision. If there are second acts in American lives, he deserves one." -- Boston Globe
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