Word: lit
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...dare denounce Opal Mehta? I refer, of course, to “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” the recently published chick-lit novel by sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 that first became famous for its singular inception, and then infamous for its not-so-singular authorship. The book’s merits and demerits aside, it is, in many respects, a product of Harvard and a reflection of our community...
First-time authors dream of theirwork 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...
...only vaguely thought of becoming a writer,” Viswanathan told the New York Sun just over a year ago, claiming she wanted to be an investment banker. This is fine, I suppose. Writers shouldn’t always take themselves too seriously, and chick lit certainly has its place (I, for one, spend a small fortune on tabloids and track Nicole Richie’s weight like a stock analyst.) Furthermore, to argue that novels should be divorced from economic reality would be absurd and na?...
...YORK—”I feel like the college years, it’s the years where you’re trying to figure yourself out through trial and error,” said Megan McCafferty, the chick-lit novelist whose work was “internalized” by Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan. McCafferty, who spoke to her fans at a public library in Manhattan yesterday, was referring not to Viswanathan but Jessica Darling, the Ivy League protagonist of her popular book series. “I wanted Jessica to make a lot of mistakes...
...brother and I met a beautiful Italian waitress in Florence who barely spoke English, she asked where we studied. “Princeton,” he said; she simply shrugged her shoulders. “Harvard,” I replied, and in a flash, her eyes lit up with excitement. “Harvard?! Amazing.” It is amazing—in a perverted and peculiar sense. We 6,600 students are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of collegians around the world, and yet we (along with our professors, our campus...