Who

McDonald is executive editor at Riverhead Books, and the man responsible for unleashing James Frey on the world.

Backstory

California native McDonald began his publishing career as an editor under Nan Talese at her imprint at Doubleday. After emerging as a rising star in the industry—he was named "It" editor by Entertainment Weekly in 2002—he decamped to Riverhead in 2003. Two years later, when Oprah picked the McDonald-edited A Million Little Pieces by James Frey for her book club, he seemed to have cemented his reputation as publishing's golden boy. That same year, in the wake of the shakeup at Riverhead that followed the departure of editors Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau (they went to Doubleday), McDonald was promoted to executive editor, reporting to publisher Geoff Kloske.

Of note

McDonald's notable projects include John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise, RZA's The Wu-Tang Manual, George Saunders' The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and the ecstatically received debut novel from Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Scandal

McDonald kept a low profile when the Smoking Gun website revealed that Frey's A Million Little Pieces was full of lies and exaggerations. (It was Talese who had to defend herself on Oprah.) By that time, McDonald had left Talese and had taken Frey with him to Riverhead, where he published Frey's bestselling sophomore effort, My Friend Leonard, another "memoir" that turned out to be just as questionable. In early 2006, McDonald and Riverhead ended their relationship with Frey and canceled a previously announced two-book deal with the author.

Just as McDonald hoped the whole mess was behind him, Frey's "debut" novel was published in May '08 amid a flurry of publicity, during which several damning accusations were thrown around. In a Vanity Fair profile of Frey, it was claimed that McDonald was aware A Million Little Pieces was partly made up, that he encouraged edits aimed at "heightening the drama," and that Frey's lawyers had threatened to prove this to the media when Random House alleged breach of contract and stopped paying him.