How a Third World Plagiarist Got Caught
by Ian Mosley
A Gentile author has a nearly impossible time getting published today especially if the proposed book or movie script has a hero resembling John Wayne. Lesbian action heroes seem to be the latest fad in Hollywood. Anything with a Third World theme has a good chance of getting published. If you’ve got a brown skin and you’re female and from the Third World and writing some decadent script with a Third World theme, you can be in like Flint with a six-figure advance for your first novel! Ask Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard University sophomore, whose book “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” was signed by the New York publishing giant Little, Brown and Company, amidst immense fanfare, while the Third Worlder was hailed as the greatest female literary genius since Gertrude Stein. (A no-talent leftist hack if ever there were one.)
There was just one little problem: Little, Brown and Company have had to pull all of the copies of the book off the shelves due to blatant plagiarism on the part of the East Asian author, which she has tearfully confessed. Viswanathan has now acknowledged that she stole numerous passages and in one case apparently a whole chapter from Megan McCafferty, whose books include “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings.” Apparently enough women read McCafferty’s work so that the copied sections of the Viswanathan manuscript were spotted almost immediately by Meg’s adoring fans and reported to her publisher. McCafferty’s attorneys allege that at least 40 passages in the Viswanathan book “contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure.”
Viswanathan has apologized repeatedly for her plagiarism. She admits she read McCafferty’s books voraciously in high school and “unintentionally” mimicked them –for page after page!! Ms. McCafferty and her own publisher, the Crown Publishing Group, have failed to show the compassion in the matter which might be expected as due to a downtrodden Third World Harvard-ette. I guess where the megabucks are concerned, feminist “sisterhood” goes right out the window. Under threat of legal action that would take them to the cleaners big-time, Little, Brown and Company was forced to withdraw the plagiarized novel from all outlets including Amazon.
The plagiarizing Hindu has lost out on some major rupees. “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” came out in March with a first printing of 100,000, and Bill Clinton’s favorite movie company DreamWorks has already acquired film rights. No word on whether or not the film deal has also fallen through now that the author has been exposed as a fraud, but then, in Hollywood fraud’s the norm.