Word: kaavya
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First-time authors dream of their work flying off the shelves--but not like this. One moment, Kaavya Viswanathan was a literary marvel, a Harvard sophomore with a reported $500,000 two-book deal and a highly touted chick-lit novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The next, her publisher, Little, Brown, was recalling every copy of Opal from the shelves, like so many tins of bad salmon. The defect? Viswanathan, 19, had plagiarized dozens of passages from two young-adult novels by Megan McCafferty...
While packagers are known to heavily revise writers' work, Viswanathan said last week that she was responsible for the borrowings. An Alloy spokeswoman told TIME that although it helped outline and plot Opal, "Kaavya wrote the book." Whoever bears the blame, it's the publishing industry that will bear the burden of having again compromised its credibility with a big-money writer. As with Frey (junkie!) and LeRoy (hustler!), here was an author with a persona (wunderkind!) that was too good not to sell. They all point to the vulnerability of a publishing business (and, let's be honest...
...under a month, we have seen this parable played out twice—with devastating plot turns even Alloy Entertainment couldn’t concoct—among our ranks at Harvard. Before allegations of plagiarism against Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 surfaced, there was the story of Eugene M. Plotkin ’00, who was arrested just two weeks ago for allegedly earning $6.7 million through an insider trading scheme with a colleague from Goldman Sachs. (In his fifth anniversary report, the New York Observer reported this month, Plotkin had written that he was working...
...writing to second Charles Drummond’s tolerant perspective on the controversy surrounding sophomore novelist Kaavya Viswanathan (“Girl Interrupted,” comment, Apr. 26). If a few plot points and a borrowed phrase every 10 pages constitute “literary identity theft”, as Tuesday’s statement from Random House alleges, few authors will escape whipping. With Chaucer and Boccaccio, Shakespeare and Holinshead, Robert Johnson and Skip James, why not Viswanathan and McCafferty? Any literary omelet worth its salt is likely to contain a few borrowed eggs...
...appears that many people believe that Kaavya Viswanathan should be given a “break.” Well, it appears to me that she has been given more than a few “breaks” in her life to date, such as a wealthy upbringing, international experience, entry into an Ivy League college, a very lucrative book contract, and an even more lucrative movie deal. I would hazard to say that many people in this world would consider themselves more than lucky to be the recipient of a single one of the above...