the theftastic adventures of Kaavya Viswanathan

Hey! Plagiarism! Fun city!

Still working out the kinks or getting my groove back, depending on your flavor of lingo.

From Wikipedia:

"Viswanathan began writing Opal Mehta while attending Bergen County Academies, a public magnet high school in Hackensack, New Jersey.[1] After receiving an early acceptance to Harvard, she showed her work to Katherine Cohen of IvyWise (a private college admissions consultancy), whom Kaavya's parents had hired to help with admission. Cohen contacted the William Morris Agency, which suggested that Viswanathan work with a division of Alloy Entertainment. Alloy is a media firm responsible for packaging the Gossip Girl book series and Ann Brashares' The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Viswanathan eventually signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company for an advance originally reported to be $500,000. Michael Pietsch, the senior vice president and publisher of Little, Brown, told the New York Times that the advance was less than the reported sum, and was split between Kaavya Viswanathan and Alloy Entertainment. She sold the movie rights of the book to DreamWorks SKG.

"On April 23, 2006, The Harvard Crimson reported that several portions of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life appeared to have been plagiarized from Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, both written by Megan McCafferty.

"On May 1, the New York Times ran a story that Viswanathan may have lifted text from Salman Rushdie's 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

"May 2 brought two additional charges. The New York Times alleged "striking similarities" between passages in Opal Mehta and those in a "chick-lit" novel called Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella.

"In addition, The Harvard Crimson alleged that Viswanathan appeared to have borrowed passages from Meg Cabot's 2000 novel The Princess Diaries.

"On May 3, the Harvard Independent noted passages in Opal Mehta similar to Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier, another young adult novel about an Indian-American teenager."

Man, how'd I totally miss out on this? This is the stuff my daydreams are made of. If it's one thing I love, it's plagiarism and the total unravelling of such. And this one is chockablock with escalating heights of ridiculousness. Winding up with an explanation of what 'book-packaging' is, a totally new concept to me:

Book-packaging companies are hired by publishers to write or co-write novels on the basis of concepts given to them by their clients. In many cases, only the barest outline and character sketches are needed. The book-packaging company, with a staff of in-house writers, does the rest.

Comments

[Vince(nt)]

You just finding out about this one? This story got a lot of attention when I was finishing school and I, of course, was happy to witness the whole thing going down like things that go down. This made me almost as excited as the whole James Frey thing.

[xtop]

I love a good bout of plagiarism, but somehow I totally missed out on this one. Apparently I need to keep my tween/chicklit antennae up more often. Tho I do like to catch these car-wrecks long after the wreckage has stopped tumbling across the highway, so as to drink it all in at once.