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The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. In January 2006, the New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy. A media frenzy ensued as JT’s fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay-male-ex-truck-stop-prostitute-turned literary-wunderkind was really an invention of Knoop, who played the character of LeRoy, and Knoop's sister-in-law Laura Albert, who wrote the books.

Now Knoop's memoir of the experience, Girl Boy Girl, has been turned into a movie, JT LeRoy, starring Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern. To link up with the film, we're publishing a new edition of the book, with a brand new preface by Knoop, exclusively online here at the Seven Stories Blog. Click through to see!

"They are making bourgeois garbage and I have been making revolutionary garbage." Thus quoth Jean-Luc Godard, about his former friends, the "bourgeois" filmmakers Truffaut and Coutard, in this 1970 interview with the Evergreen Review's Kent Carroll. It's a fascinating text, in which Godard, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, his partner in the class-conscious Dziga-Vertov Group, discuss American students, revolutionary struggle, and "what the Chinese call a bullet wrapped in sugar." We hope you enjoy!

If the Cultural Purity Police (CPP) had their way, they would brand British curry as theft, but every cuisine consists of an infinite number of borrowings and travels, sometimes stretching back millennia. . . . The idea of cultural purity now determines what representations we might safely consume without guilt. . . . [T]he loss is ours, doomed as we are to sterile images that question and probe nothing, offering only vast oceans of purity . . . .

In recent weeks, we've seen two amazing documentaries I want you all to know about.

There’s no greater chronicler of the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century than Gary Indiana. A novelist, playwright, photographer, poet, and former art critic at the Village Voice, Indiana has set down a generation’s pathologies for posterity. Now, exclusively for the Seven Stories Blog, he takes on the case Jann Wenner, the impresario behind Rolling Stone. Check out Indiana’s review of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine here!

Introducing a new feature on the Seven Stories blog: an indie bookstore round-up, in which staff and other members of our community write a few words on their other favorite independent bookstores. This week, Ben Hillin writes about Topos, in Ridgewood, Queens.

Twenty-eight states are participating in the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program this election season, a program supposedly designed to comb through voter lists and prevent fraud. Seems pretty benign, right? There’s no way Crosscheck, launched by Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, could be insidious and racist, is there?

The chapter below is excerpted from Khary Lazarre-White's Passage. As Farah Jasmine Griffin put it, Passage is "a work of great originality, pain, and aching beauty. Its protagonist, Warrior, a sensitive, haunted and haunting young man, bears the burden of history: the past is always near, shaping and informing present realities of black boys like himself."

Excerpted from Paul Auster's A Life in Words: Conversations with I. B. Siegumfeldt, available for purchase from our site at 25% off list price.

In the conversation below, acclaimed novelist Paul Auster and scholar I. B. Siegumfeldt discuss Auster's "Portrait of an Invisible Man," which comprises one half of The Invention of Solitude and served as the pivotal piece of writing for Auster's movement into a style wholly his own. Auster discusses the hazards of literary education ("I’d come to such a point of self-consciousness that I somehow believed that every novel had to be completely worked out in advance"); the death of his father ("My father came from the generation of men who wore neckties, and apparently he kept every tie he ever owned. When he died, there must have been a hundred of them in his closet. You are confronted by these ties, which are, in a sense, a miniature history of his life."); and the vitality of the unconscious ("I understood that everything comes from within and moves out. It’s never the reverse. Form doesn’t precede content. The material itself will find its own form as you’re working through it."). We hope you enjoy!

Entrapment had made the day’s events, and my own life, seem like legitimate literary subjects. The characters in its pages were called Frank Mears, and Blackie Cavanaugh, and Little Lester, but when I read about them I felt I was reading about old friends. They were the kids I had played with in the abandoned lot behind my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a child; men I knocked around with on street corners, gyms, and bars; my old friend Bones, an alcoholic who looked after me when I became a bicycle messenger at seventeen, and then hung himself from a pipe running along the ceiling of his basement apartment.