Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Quick updates

Gawker now puts the tally of authors possibly plagarized by Kaavya Viswanathan at five: Megan McCafferty, Sophie Kinsella, Salman Rushdie, Meg Cabot (author of the Princess Diaries), and Tanuja Desai Hidier, whose book Born Confused also concerns an Indian-American protagonist living in New Jersey. Little, Brown has also announced that Viswanathan's book will not be reissued (at this point, to this observer, it doesn't seem like there's enough of the book left to revise into a reissuable form), and that it is canceling the second book of Viswanathan's two-book contract. (Thanks, Len.) Interestingly enough, the NY Times is reporting that Viswanathan's contract with Little, Brown was signed by Alloy, Viswanathan's book packager, and not Viswanathan herself.

In other, unrelated news, I feel a bit better about my own self-professed semi-ignorance of Caitlin Flanagan. An ad for Flanagan's new book To Hell with All That appearing in both this week's New York Times Book Review and New Yorker leads with "Who the hell is Caitlin Flanagan and why is everybody talking about her?"

Who indeed.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Salman Rushdie? WTF? Did he write a chick-lit novel?

-- Len

Anonymous said...

Also, I love reading about this. Its like a trainwreck: I can't look away.

I wonder if her professors are now investigating her papers...

-- Len, again.

Gavin said...

Apparently, Rushdie's book was a children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Havard seems to be hedging their bets as to what they're going to do with Viswanathan.