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Monday, April 24, 2006

How Megan Got Her Prose Back

Everybody’s writing about the latest plagiarism case - a Harvard undergrad who apparently started writing novels in her mother’s womb - but only the Independent has the proper lead:


A 19-year-old Harvard student whose debut novel, [How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life], was set to become the next sensation of the American literary world has been accused of plagiarizing another US coming-of-age novel.

Written when Ms Viswanathan was still in high school in New Jersey, the novel earned her a $500,000 (£280,000) two-book contract and a film deal with DreamWorks. Largely thanks to lavish media coverage of her precocious success, the book has shot up the New York Times bestseller list. It was number 32 in the hardcover fiction list last week

Yesterday, however, the Harvard Crimson published strikingly similar passages from the new book and from the 2001 novel Sloppy Firsts, by Megan McCafferty, which is about teenage life in New Jersey.



You can see how the star-making machinery (as Joni Mitchell called it) was all geared up for this one: Our very own Francoise Sagan, a dark ethnic beauty, amazingly precocious...

Luckily, this sort of James Freyesque mechanical failure happens so often lately, the same machinery can now be pretty quickly shut down. As quickly as Viswanathan has shut down her own blog.


--thanks to jw for the tip--
Posted at: 4/24/2006 05:35:00 PM