Infamous author James Frey gets spanked by lit establishment amid kinky book launch

For James Frey, Tuesday was a day of orgiastic sex — and getting vigorously screwed.

The infamous author is back with a new novel, “Next To Heaven,” and he staged a reading to celebrate.

There was a something of a rock-show atmosphere as Frey, 55, took the stage at Harper’s Gallery in Chelsea and flipped off the crowd with both fingers, while young female fans quite literally squealed from the standing room in the back.

The author, who got a bad reputation after making up parts of his 2003 memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” walked to the mic while “Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett played. (“I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation,” it goes.)

“What’s up New York,” he said, “It feels great to f***ing be here. My career started a couple of neighborhoods away. I moved here after I had written ‘A Million Little Pieces’ and before it had come out. I moved here to f***ing burn the world down, and it’s felt great to f***ing do it.”

He explained that his publisher for the new book had been — as his publishers, he said, always are — “scared” (emphasis his) to print the book. “I don’t write, ever, books that are about rainbows and unicorns and f***ing bunny rabbits,” he said.

His warm-up acts for the evening included “Motherlode” author Sarah Hoover, who read a Victorian poem with a heavy use of the “C-word,” actress Gina Gershon, who read an S&M “contract” between a dominant and their submissive, writer and reality star Carole Radziwill who read a story she’d written about the oily allure of NASCAR racers, Air Mail’s Lili Anolik, who read a passage from the memoir of saxophone player and self-described rapist Art Pepper about a mutual masturbation session with a hotel maid, and influencer Annie Hamilton, who read about her own early experimentations with solo sex.

Frey read a section from “Next To Heaven” about a swingers party. In part of the passage, a swinger says to her swinging partner, “I’ve heard you’re big.” She offers a rumor that says he’s “ten inches.” “Ten and three eighths,” he replies.

Meanwhile, it was with a critical probe of roughly those proportions that the New Yorker mercilessly penetrated Frey’s prose in a story published earlier in the the day.

In “James Frey’s New Cancelled-Guy Sex Novel Is as Bad as It Sounds,” the mag argues that “Frey has rebranded himself as an early victim of cancel culture and seeks redemption in a media environment that he believes has finally caught up to him and his adventures on the post-truth frontier.”

It says that the book is reminiscent of his early work because it’s unbelievable (in a bad way), and the mag moans (in a bad way) that, for example, its “evocation of a woman’s grief sounds like it was ripped from a B.D.S.M. personals ad.”

One can only hope Frey has a thing for getting trodden on by men in monocles.