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If the recent upswing in fake authours wasn't enough to convince you of the deathly state of the literary world, chew on this: A Harvard University sophomore with a highly publicized first novel acknowledged Monday that she had borrowed material, accidentally, from another author's work and promised to change her book for future editions.


Putting aside the editorial license/slopply lede writing (ie. "accidentally"?), it seems things are so dire that people can't even find good books to plagarize anymore:

Kaavya Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," published in March by Little, Brown and Company, was the first of a two-book deal reportedly worth six figures. But on Sunday, the Harvard Crimson cited seven passages in Viswanathan's book that closely resemble the style and language of the novels of Megan McCafferty.

Megan who?

McCafferty's books follow a heroine named Jessica, a New Jersey girl who excels in high school but struggles with her identity and longs for a boyfriend. McCafferty is a former editor at Cosmopolitan who has written three novels.

I've not read her stuff, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say an ex-Cosmo staffer is no Delillo*.

Now, if you're an aspiring authour and you want to gank something for your book, wouldn't you think it's a good idea to maybe look outside the narrow confines of the genre you are working in? Silly rabbit.

Of course the other side here is that, since all chicklit stuff is pretty much interchangable anyway, what's a little overt plagarism?

*I'm not discounting the possibility that she's a decent or even good writer. But I'm not exactly her target market, wot?