extra breaking news!

Harold's End Readings!

Reading in San Francisco, Tuesday 11/23, 7pm at City Lights, 261 Columbus Ave. Readers are orehound Stillpoint, Tara Jepsen, Daphne Gottlieb, Monique Everhart, Tim Donnelly, and Sherilyn Connelly.

You're invited to celebrate with JT at book readings on both coasts for the release of JT's new novella, Harold's End! Live performances by his band THISTLE, LLC! The first U.S. screening of "The Heart is Deceitful...Above All Things"! Click for information!

The film of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things now has a website! Click to see the latest news and updates!

Press!

Read the New York Times profile of JT!
From Vanity Fair's Hot Type, December 2004: "Blessed with haunting watercolor portraits by Cherry Hood, JT LeRoy's Harold's End (Last Gasp), 'a street hustler power ballad,' slices deep into a world of unbearable sadness and beauty."

breaking news

See the press release for Harold's End!

An essay by JT appears in XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Buy it from Amazon:

jt sightings!

From Skyehawke.com:

The lost fanletter of Randy Harrison to JT Leroy:

i'm sorry i missed you in ny, again. i tell ya, i'm starting to think you're avoiding me. your new wig is beautiful. saw it on the internet. lots of people think you're great, and i don't like being overly excited about telling you how great i think you are, because i'd hate to scare you like my fans scare me. besides i'm not really a fan. it's more that i appreciate your work. a lot. like a stranger who just happens to really get you on some intense level that haunts my soul. the PR maelstrom around you keeps me at a distance and that makes me sad. i've quit the absinthe. moved on to herbal teas. they make me have to pee a lot. glad your still eating lots of chocolate; i mean, based on the contents of your trash the last few weeks. i need to stop smoking. but it makes my voice sound hot. random. thank you. i love you. i mean, i loved you when you wrote harold's end. yeah. there's something about the way you say things that lets me know that we are linked in a karmic way. it's destiny. you seduce and haunt me. i've said it before, but it's true. i guess i'll keep on knowing that i know you, or pretending that i know you, (or pretending to pretend that i know you). I don't know. whatever. it makes me really happy just to know that you're alive out there and that you have that (aliveness, i mean) and that i have that (your aliveness). it gives me hope. you can post what i wrote if you want.
Randy
::::::
Author's Notes:
madeofgold asked:
Aren't you frightened to think what subsequent letters to JT might have sounded like?

If you're hip in L.A., try on some JT! LA.com has the scoop:

Shopping guide: Vermont Ave
Vibe: Artistic...with a trust fund
Accessory: Rocker girlfriend (or boyfriend)
Literature: Dog-eared J.T. Leroy book
Read the full guide!

JT is bookworm-cool according to trendcentral! Here's the excerpt:

The fashion crowd gets literary.
According to our UK trendsetters, what you read can say as much about your cool credo as your funky home furnishings and your favorite local dive bar. Now, being a bookworm is fashionable. In the UK, hip authors such as Zadie Smith and Gwendoline Riley are taking on rock star status among the in-the-know elite. We saw it start to happen here in the States last year when we saw biblio-inspired fashion in the Spring 2003 fashion shows (Biblio Fashion TC) when JT Leroy’s novel Sarah inspired the design duo Heatherette and Italian label Costume National.
Among magazines, the "it" magazine of the moment among trendy UK booklovers is Zembla, a new literary magazine that is attracting the design/fashion crowd. The magazine's trendy layout and artistic covers have attracted trendsetter devotees - as well as advertisers such as Marc Jacobs, Jil Sander, Christian Dior, Paul Smith, Issey Miyake, and Beck's. We suspect this could signal a shift from having book clubs in people’s homes to hosting them in more innovative settings such as local art galleries. We're also look forward to sexy librarian looks this fall with pencil skirts, black rimmed glasses, and tight cardigans. Get your library card ready.

JT mentioned in Arts Telegraph article on great non-fiction. Here's an excerpt:

In the end, most of the things that make non-fiction last are the same things that make fiction last. Many offer the pleasures of identification. The best tell you something really, really interesting about the world. And the very best are also well written. The horror and pity with which the reader of military history reads Stalingrad; the excitement with which the adventure-lover devours Bravo Two Zero; the salivating hunger with which I look at the photographs of Nigella in How to Eat... All these are reactions that fiction can elicit. And yet they benefit from the added frisson of knowing, or believing, that the siege happened to real people, that that SAS guy really did that, that Nigella, somewhere, really exists.
It's not much of a surprise, then, that one of the things most immediately striking about the Ottakars/Daily Telegraph list of suggestions for the best-loved non-fiction books is how liminal most of those books are: how many of the best and most compelling of them are stylistically identical to novels; how many draw their virtues from the application of imaginative detail to an armature of fact.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a twisted, acidic, horror-comical picaresque, with Hunter Thompson as its Don Peyote . It could as well be set on the moon for all it tells you, in terms of facts, about the car race taking place in the Nevada desert on which he is supposedly reporting. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius straddles the border between novel and memoir - as, outside our list, do JT Leroy's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and Dale Peck's re-imagining of his father's childhood, What We Lost. Narratives of discovery and exploration, from Pliny (a shocking maker-up-of-things, incidentally) via Thor Heyerdahl to the brilliantly funny Redmond O'Hanlon, seem to tap into a deep, childlike urge to hear tall tales told.
Read the whole story.

Bill Clinton doing JT LeRoy?? Claire Zulkey thinks so!

"Today, Bill Clinton manages to piss off all political parties and the ghost of Ronald Reagan by stealing the spotlight with the release of his autobiography, My Life, for which he was paid approximately eleventeen katrillion dollars. Bloggers around the country want to know why they're not as handsomely reimbursed to write overlong, hazily flattering descriptions of their own lives.
"America's first black president, who is notoriously shy, will reluctantly promote his book. Word on the street is that he will probably go the JT Leroy route, hanging in the back of bookstores during readings, wearing a wig and sunglasses, while Courtney Love or Winona Ryder read for him."
Read the whole article here.

From trendcentral: JT starts a fashion trend!

Forget the streets, the rockstars or even the celebs; the next big fashion movements may get their inspiration from books.
Writer JT LeRoy, who we wrote about in October 2001, may be known as a recluse, but the characters of his novel Sarah have become fashion icons. In fact, influences from Sarah showed up in two Spring 2003 fashion shows. Club-kids-turned-downtown-design duo Heatherette and Italian label Costume National said their collections were inspired by the book about a cross-dressing truck-stop lover in West Virginia. Heatherette showed little girl dresses with hillbilly flair and Costume National designer Ennio Capasa has said that his intellectually sexy collection was inspired by a single sentence from the novel.
It seems everyone is looking for inspiration these days. All artistic expressions are being explored, from movies to art to music, so it seems inevitable that literature could be the next medium for inspiration. Books offer not only creativity but also the permanence of the written word in these unpredictable times.

JT mentioned in interview with stylist, Arianne Phillips

JT says: "I love Ari, she was the stylist on the shoot I did with Steven Klein, one of the first shoots I did. She made me feel safe, she made me feel loved. She has become a very close friend, someone I can tell anything to. She is brilliant and I love her." Here's the excerpt:
V: Have you ever been star struck or are you beyond that?
AP: Only once or twice, but usually its fleeting. People are people and once a conversation starts all that dispates....Meeting David Bowie and having a meeting with him was a bit unnerving at first, but within minutes of meeting him I was put at ease,and we could focus on the work at hand,and the second time was recently when I was asked to dress author JT Leroy for a photo session.
I think in those two experiences it was because I have such a long time personal connection to David Bowies music ,and the same can be said of JT's writing. Lucky for me they were both very sweet and generous people !!!
Read the whole interview.

From Word Riot, and online literary magazine

Excerpt from "Success" by Paula Anderson:
"She's right, Greg," I said, and mirrored her Mother-knows-best look at him. It all filled me with glee. I grinned like a fool. We were just so cool sitting there. As J.T. LeRoy might say, we were cool as cucumbers in a married woman's fridge. Even if I was only cool by association. But then again, so is Conan O'Brien.
Read the full story.