Word: viswanathans
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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...
...writer, a scandal: this too sounds like something we have read somewhere before. The new element, following the James Frey and JT LeRoy scandals, is the role a little-known pop-culture tastemaker played in how Viswanathan got signed, got famous and got a comeuppance...
...Viswanathan shares the copyright for Opal with Alloy Entertainment, a book packager, which develops book ideas, hires writers, then delivers a finished product to publishers. Packagers have been more common in nonfiction--cookbooks, joke books--but Alloy has turned itself into a giant of young-women's fiction. Headed by Leslie Morgenstein, 39, Alloy has put together hit series, including The Clique and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. It's a "fiction factory," as a publishing insider calls it, but one with a well-respected sense of the mercurial girl culture; Alloy's parent company also owns the teen...
...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...
That aside, it would be wrong to say that I don’t have any sympathy for Viswanathan, because I do. She is falling hard and fast, and it is probable that a certain amount of blame for this situation may be the result of some misdirection by third parties. However, we all have to grow up sometime, and I would have more sympathy for Viswanathan if she had accepted responsibility for her actions or shown the slightest bit of remorse. She has done neither, and unless she stops and acknowledges that she has learned her lesson...