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More old news. In his Slate article “Dead Plagiarists Society,” Paul Collins discusses intriguing possibilities in the age of Google: Given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out [...]

So News Corp. is canceling If I Did It–both the book and the TV show. From the AP, via the Washington Post: NEW YORK — After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and TV special “If I Did It.” “I and senior management agree with [...]

James Frey has, of course, already confessed that he didn’t really serve that three-month stint in the pokey that he wrote about in A Million Little Pieces. Given that My Friend Leonard starts with Frey in stir, his latest admission is a bit anticlimactic. I wonder if Kaavya Viswanathan will now confess that she was [...]

I might have overdone it yesterday, so just a few final links on the Kaavya Viswanathan controversy (if this were a high-school newspaper or a small-town mini-mart I could spell it “Kontroversy” – how I wish I could): Slate’s Jack Shafer explains Why Plagiarists Do It… …Kaavya Viswanathan apologizes again… …The Book Standard claims a [...]

Megan McCafferty to Kaavya Viswanathan: apology so not accepted. More on the YA age-range thing in the comments to yesterday’s post. But, as I say far too often, back to soccer. I’m working my way through the 32 essays (one for each country in competition) in The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup and [...]

Well, Kaavya Viswanathan confessed. Sort of. She did copy language from Megan McCafferty, she said, but the borrowing was “unintentional and unconscious.” Her agent backed her up, saying, “Teenagers tend to adopt each other’s language.” (These quotes are cribbed from the New York Times article; there’s a free article at the Harvard Crimson.) Yesterday I [...]

I don’t usually patrol the Books for Youth beat, but while I was speed-eating a bowl of cereal this morning, I spotted a bit of literary news in the pages of the Chicago Tribune (yes, I read it the old-fashioned way, on paper). When I got to work, I found the original story in the [...]