How Kaavya Viswanathan Lost Her Book Deal
After ordering that bookstores pull plagiarizing Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan's book from the shelves, publisher Little, Brown has decided to permanently withdraw the title, meaning that no more copies will be printed and we'll all be spared a pithy author's note in the second edition. If you've not yet scored your own copy of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, you can do so on eBay for about 40 bucks.
Not unexpectedly, the second book under Viswanathan's contract will not be published. As for her reported $500,000 advance, there's a chance Viswanathan could be asked to return the money — plagiarism is technically a breach of contract. For her sake, we hope she didn't already spend the cash on those flashy rims she's been wanting.
Meanwhile, the author's classmates refuse to let up on the scrutiny: today they've concluded that she's also ripped passages from a similar novel called Born Confused. So that puts Kaavya at possibly plagiarizing six different titles — if she would just take a second to add some citations, she could totally win the Morning News contest.
[Ed: No, we will not stop using this picture of her. It's too perfect.]
No Encore for Opal [Publishers Weekly]
Yet More Suspicious Passages Found in Kaavya's Opal Mehta [Harvard Independent]