Oops, it's happened again! It turns out some details aren't quite right in "Primates of Park Avenue," a headline-making chronicle of rich New Yorkers' weird habits. So we now have the familiar spectacle of a publisher trying to acknowledge such problems without disowning the work entirely. Is there a way to avoid all this hand-wringing?
Yes there is. Publishing's traditional dividing line - in which books are either fiction or nonfiction - is too strict for modern times. We need a third category, built to accommodate books that nimbly try to straddle both genres. Such books are chock full of genuine facts. But sometimes ordinary facts get rearranged or embellished a bit, especially if there's a so-called larger truth that the author wants to explore.
