I know! Shocking, right? Frey says that he expects to “get blasted” for this. The press has happily joined him in rubbing its hands together over the prospect, deploying words like “controversial” and “firestorm” in stories that Frey promptly posts to his website. “I tried to write a radical book. I’m releasing it in a radical way,” Frey told the New York Post. So it’s possible his Christ might be a skateboarder, too.

But seriously, who besides good ol’ Bill Donohue at the Catholic League can possibly be counted on to take offense at such a stunt? “I’m sure the religious right will go crazy,” Frey said. Well, at least someone is sure. But since Philip Pullman barely raised a snort from them with “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” last year — and that was a famous atheist’s revisionist account of the historical Jesus, not just a fancifully smutty imagining of his second coming — I would not advise the author to hold his breath.

In fact, there’s already a long history of revisionist literary accounts of Jesus’ life and social criticism disguised as fiction depicting his return. Among the most renowned in the first category are “The Last Temptation of Christ” by Nikos Kazantzakis (1951), “Quarantine” by Jim Crace (1997) and “The Gospel According to the Son” by Norman Mailer (1999), as well as the comic romp “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” by Christopher Moore (2001) and about a zillion New-Agey retellings that turn Mary Magdalene into the heroine.

The observation that the Jesus of the Scriptures would be dismayed at what his professed followers get up to today is also by no means rare. In 2008, Roland Merullo published “American Savior,” in which a pro-choice Jesus runs for president, and in 1990, James Morrow’s “Only Begotten Daughter” has the Messiah reincarnated as a woman. Science fiction writers have been particularly fond of using the trope to illuminate the hypocrisies and injustices of our time, as Frey presumably intends to do. Theodore Sturgeon’s last novel, “Godbody,” features a savior who communicates divine love by touch and who predictably winds up slaughtered by a mob. And surely the best-known crypto-Christ in all science fiction is Valentine Michael Smith of Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” a human instilled with the hippieish values of Mars, who meets an equally ugly end.

The most celebrated literary second coming of all, however, is the “Grand Inquisitor” section from Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” in which Christ returns to Medieval Spain and is sentenced to be burned at the stake by the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell on the eve of the execution and delivers a long explication of how the Church has moved beyond his teachings after realizing that the vast majority of human beings cannot cope with and do not really want freedom. It’s a profound meditation on courage and free will. That’s a tough act to follow, Mr. Frey, no matter how radical you’re prepared to get.

But controversial? Not really. Kazantzakis’ novel did provoke some genuine furor when it was first released 60 years ago, and the book has a history of being banned. Nowadays, however, you can’t expect mere print to get you properly blasted. You need pictures. Protesters picketed theaters screening Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988, and are believed to have seriously damaged its earnings. The following year, conservatives used Andres Serrano’s photograph “Piss Christ” as an argument to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave him $15,000 for the work. A decade later, New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum for exhibiting a purportedly blasphemous painting.

So no wonder Frey has hooked up with the art world for this particular scheme. It’s like going to Blackwater for bodyguards; making the holy rollers mad is just what they do. Still, the project itself seems a miscalculation. So far, Frey’s notoriety has been founded on two pillars: producing a memoir that turned out to be partially fabricated and running a sort of book factory in which recent MFA graduates are gulled into laboring like sweatshop seamstresses for meager pay. Before that, he attracted attention by bad-mouthing more famous writers.

The genius of this strategy is that it focuses on offending that tiny class of Americans who still care about books and can be expected to notice the people who write them. Who else would wax indignant on the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction and/or the exploitation of aspiring novelists? And that’s certainly not the same crowd who rants about the War on Christmas or tries to put prayer back in schools. In fact, it’s not clear that that crowd ever reads anything — including the Bible. Even Pullman, who was piping atheist propaganda directly into our school libraries for a nearly a decade, didn’t get called on it until they made his book into a movie.

Could it be that Frey, for all this talk about getting blasted, is now courting the very people he once specialized in outraging? You can become a minor hero to the liberal intelligentsia if your work gets you persecuted by bullies like Bill O’Reilly. Of course, that would involve Frey making himself over as a victim, when the world he inhabits seems much happier to cast him as the villain. A role-change like that isn’t going to be easy. As a matter of fact, it’s going to take a miracle.

Further reading

The New York Post on James Frey’s announcement of “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible”

The Rumpus interviews James Frey

James Frey’s website

New York magazine on Full Fathom Five, James Frey’s fiction factory

Salon on the fabrications discovered in James Frey’s memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” in 2006

But if the e-book boom shows us anything, it’s that there’s an infinite variety to what people want from their books. For some, the immateriality of an e-book is a deal-breaker — they can’t pass it on to a friend or sell it to a used bookstore once they’re done with it. For others (like me), this is a feature, not a bug; I can retain a copy of it without having to clear space in the overflowing shelves of my small apartment, and I never have to figure out where I put the thing if I happen to want it in the future. (I’m always misplacing books, so this is a big plus for me.)

Google eBookstore addresses a complaint many have lodged against Amazon’s Kindle: The books bought for it can only be read using Kindle software. This would be a major problem if there weren’t Kindle apps for iOS and Droid devices, as well as for Windows and Mac computers; I don’t own a Kindle, but I own several Kindle e-books and read them on my iPhone and iPad. What I can’t do with my Kindle books is read them on a friend’s iPad during a visit, or on a shared work computer if I want, say, to point out an interesting passage to a colleague. Google’s e-books will be accessible via a user’s Google account from any device that runs a Web browser (that includes tablet computers and smart phones), as well as via apps designed to run on various mobile platforms. I can also read my Google e-books on a Nook or Sony Reader, should I ever decide to buy one, something I can’t do with Kindle titles. But remember: You also can’t use your Kindle to read any e-books you buy from Google.

So let’s review: Google eBooks is a big improvement on the Kindle (still the most popular dedicated e-reader device) if you anticipate wanting to switch from one dedicated e-reader device to another, but if you’re switching to an iPad, then it’s a wash. On the other hand, if you’re a student at the library one afternoon without your Kindle or iPad and you want to be able to access a Kindle book you bought for a class, you’re out of luck. (If that last example strikes you as an exotic scenario, bear in mind that while Kindles are the most popular dedicated e-reader devices, the majority of people who read e-books still read them on a laptop or desktop computer, and many of these readers are students.) Your Google e-books, however, can be read on the library’s computer using a Web browser. But hold on a minute! — Amazon just announced that it will be introducing its own Web-browser-based Kindle reader in a month or so.

In other words, figuring out which e-book system will best meet your needs is really, really confusing. News reports on the latest developments tend to be full of glaring errors — the most common assumption being that you have to have a Nook or a Kindle e-reading device to read Nook or Kindle e-books. And keep in mind that there are also several other smaller e-book formats, devices and vendors, every one of which offers the same public domain titles. If you want to read mostly classics, you might prefer the look of one of these other formats to that of any of the major players. One advantage to the iPad/iPhone is that I’m able to buy and read Kindle, Nook, Stanza and Google e-books as well as use public-domain-only apps like Eucalyptus, a favorite of one of my Salon colleagues. Most public-domain book apps are free, but she was willing to pay for Eucalyptus (which, alas, has only been released for the iPhone) because its superior design makes reading that much easier.

If you’re intrigued by e-books but don’t want to deprive your local independent bookstore of your patronage, Google eBooks may have the answer to your dilemma. Google has formed partnerships with several indie bookstores, enabling them to sell Google eBooks from their websites for a cut of the sales. This a great way to support neighborhood bookstores and it also allows Google eBookstore customers to partake of the expertise of people whose life’s work is connecting readers with the right books. Booksellers also make the best ambassadors to late adapters. The explanation of Google eBooks on the website of the legendary Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, for example, is much clearer and more comprehensive than the one offered by Google itself.

Then there’s the issue of selection. I don’t doubt that Google eBooks carries more titles than the Kindle store, but that distinction is only meaningful if the additional titles happen to be books you want, and you can figure out how to find them. I spent a few hours banging around on Google eBookstore, comparing it primarily to Amazon’s Kindle store, and came up with some interesting results.

The first is that Google eBookstore isn’t necessarily easy to search — an irony considering that the Google empire was built on search. There’s only one search field in which to enter terms, and while it’s possible to delimit the search by using such formulations as “inauthor:’George Meredith’”, this isn’t explained anywhere and there’s no advanced search page allowing you to specify that you only want to see results with, say, the title “Diana of the Crossways” and the author “George Meredith.”

Because Google eBookstore is somewhat awkwardly integrated with Google Books, a vast library of full and partial scanned texts designed more as a research tool than a store, it returns a lot more results than you get from searching Amazon. Those results will include every book that even mentions “Diana of the Crossways” or “Meredith,” in addition to the book I actually wanted, “Diana of the Crossways” by George Meredith. All these extraneous titles are merely annoyingly if you happen to have gotten all your search terms right, but I misremembered the title of this Victorian novel as “Diana of the Crossroads,” and got a pageful of results many of which didn’t seem to have anything to do with the book, such as a 1910 law text titled “The Constitution of the United States: Its History Application and Construction.”

Google eBooks does offer an e-book of “Diana of the Crossways,” but it was hard to find without the exact title, whereas on Amazon I could plug “George Meredith” in the author field and “Diana” into the title field and get the right book, in its Kindle version, as the second result. Searching on “George Meredith Diana” in Google eBookstore turned up mostly useless garbage, including dozens of weird little overpriced booklets apparently derived from excerpts from “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations,” and, strangely enough, no copy of “Diana of the Crossways.”

Any bookstore clerk can tell you that many customers are looking for books whose authors and titles they can’t quite remember. Muddying the water with a lot of irrelevant information doesn’t help in such situations. Wanting to buy a copy of “Diana of the Crossways” and wanting to survey a list of books that mention it are two entirely different sorts of searches, and you should be able to do one without mucking about with the other.

That said, there are titles you can buy on Google eBookstore that you can’t get from the Kindle store: “Imaginations” by William Carlos Williams and “Austerlitz” by W.G. Sebald (chosen by Salon as one of the best books of the year in 2001) are two. On the other hand, I was able to buy an e-book of Dorothy Dunnett’s “Game of Kings” from the Kindle store, while Google eBookstore apparently carries none of her books. Neither store offers e-book versions of “Riddley Walker” by Russell Hoban or “Street of Crocodiles” by Bruno Schultz, two titles I recently thought I’d like to have stashed in my iPad. This is often the case with in-copyright books that are more than a decade or so old. Google may someday be able to add them to its store if it can ever resolve the endless legal disputes surrounding its efforts to scan the contents of the world’s major libraries.

One interesting aspect of Google eBookstore’s public domain titles derives from the fact that many of them began as scanned copies of library books. Using your browser or Google eBook app, you can view these books either in their scanned version — with the original type, page numbering and even library stamps and marginalia, basically photographs of the printed pages — or as searchable “flowing text,” rendered by optical character recognition. There’s been a lot of debate about the uneven quality of the scans used by Google Books; scholars have reported crumpled pages, obscuring thumbs and fingers, and smeared or blurry images. You can see evidence of some of that in the Google version of L. Frank Baum’s “The Patchwork Girl of Oz,” including duplicate pages and page clips, but it’s nice to have the option of seeing the print book’s beautifully designed pages with illustrations by John R. Neill — and even a careful inscription by the book’s original child owner, one Camilla Merriman.

Unfortunately, the public domain titles I did find in Google eBookstore were often of lesser quality than the free or very low cost versions in the Kindle, Nook and iBooks stores. The text version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford,” for example, had obviously not been proofed and the scans of the original pages were difficult to read. The Kindle texts seem to be created from Project Gutenberg files, which are usually proofed, and some care has been taken in their design, a factor too many penny-pinching e-book buyers fail to account for in their quest for free stuff. One thing you can say for those e-book retailers who, unlike Google, are pushing a pricey gadget: They have more motivation to provide decent free or nearly free content to install on their users’ new toys.

Google eBookstore’s poor consumer interface — you can tell it was devised by people who know next to nothing about the book trade — isn’t going to introduce many readers to new books and authors. It’s about as dismal in that respect as the iBooks store, and neither can compete with the rich customer-generated metadata offered by longtime online booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Google has incorporated reader reviews from the social networking service GoodReads, which helps, as these are often more thoughtful than the average Amazon reader review, but the “related books” suggestion lists still have some kinks to iron out — fans of Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” are referred to a trashy novel titled “Bling Addiction,” for example.

If Google is as smart as it’s made out to be, it will realize that its indie bookstore affiliates are its secret weapon. Helping readers find new books and new favorite authors is their area of expertise. So far, though, the Google eBookstore page dedicated to its partnerships with booksellers is pretty skimpy; it shows logos for Alibris and Powell’s Books, but doesn’t actually link to their sites. For a service that claims to be “all about choice,” it still has a ways to go.

Further reading:

Google eBookstore explains itself

Tattered Cover Books on everything you always wanted to know about e-books

A list of independent booksellers who sell Google e-books on their sites

What Apple’s iBooks needs to learn about selling books

How rampant errors threaten the usefulness of Google Books for scholars

The book is also about how Levi Johnston is still a craven, awful monster. And babies Tripp and Trig are still little accidental angels that everyone is very happy were not aborted. And the Tea Parties are good and Michelle Obama is an awful, embittered reverse-racist.

Besides the requisite airing of personal grudges, the book seems wholly indistinguishable from an effort by any randomly selected right-wing radio host.

The book tour begins Nov. 23. And because the excerpts ended up on liberal, anti-Palin sites, Palin is very upset.

The publishing world is LEAKING out-of-context excerpts of my book w/out my permission? Isn’t that illegal?

Would that it were illegal to report on the intellectual output of Sarah Palin, political commentator and social critic! Politico would be a lot thinner every weekday.

We can’t fully judge the book until we’ve read it. But the book jacket explicitly says:

This groundbreaking book reveals: … Why the popular belief that Lindbergh was an anti–Semite is absolutely wrong

Lindbergh’s leading role in the America First Committee, which argued strongly against U.S. involvement in what would become World War II, is well known. But what about the anti-Semitism question?

We’re not experts on Lindbergh, and obviously he was a major and complex historical figure. However, when we asked City University of New York History Professor David Gordon, who is an expert and has written on the topic, he told us that there’s good reason Lindbergh is considered an anti-Semite.

Gordon points first to a famous speech Lindbergh made in Des Moines in September 1941, in which Lindbergh named three parties — the British, the Roosevelt Administration, and the Jews — who were pushing for war. He said of the latter group:

Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

The speech sparked outrage at the time and became a major self-inflicted blow to Lindbergh’s reputation. Still, modern-day Lindbergh defenders like Pat Buchanan have argued that what he was saying in that speech was essentially true.

That defense could not possibly apply to writings in Lindbergh’s journal. To wit, an entry from 1939 in which he discusses Jews on board a ship from Europe to America getting sea-sick, and then:

Imagine the United States taking these Jews in addition to those we already have. There are too many in places like New York already. A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.

Regnery has for decades been the unofficial publishing arm of the right-wing of the Republican Party. It recently published, for example, Dinesh D’Souza’s book that paints President Obama as a Kenyan anti-colonialist.

In what is probably not the best strategy to attract Jewish voters to the conservative movement, Regnery is promoting “Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt” by playing up supposed parallels to the present, with Obama in the role of villain (Roosevelt), and the conservative opposition in the role of hero (Lindbergh). From a Q&A with author James Duffy:

Regnery: Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt is a history book. Do you think it holds any relevance to current events?

Duffy: Absolutely! The demonization of Lindbergh by FDR and his supporters is being replayed today against people who oppose the policies of Barack Obama. By describing what happened to Lindbergh’s reputation, I wanted to issue a warning to all right-thinking and fair-minded people because it is very important that such character abuse and censorship not happen again.