Little, Brown, and Co. announced Thursday evening that it will withdraw Kaavya Viswanathan’s disputed novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The Associated Press reports that the publisher instructed retail and wholesale outlets to cease sales and to return unsold copies. A move that, according to the Washington Post is “fairly unheard of” in the publishing industry. The Post article quoted one observer as saying “they must have a very good case . . . if Little, Brown and Company is going to such extremes.”
For what it’s worth, I completely, absolutely and unreservedly believe that it’s possible the lady in question didn’t consciously plagiarize.
I had a similar thing happen to me once.
When I was in college I borrowed a book called _Death of the Fifth Sun_, read it, returned it to the person I borrowed it from, and forgot about it. Ten years later I came across a copy in a used book store, recognized it, bought it, and reread it.
You have only my word for this–and we all know that people on the internet never lie–but I did not consciously plagiarize the other author’s book in any way. Nonetheless, I was more than slightly surprised to discover that many of the characters in the published novel were identical to those in a novel I was then writing.
It was just luck that I noticed this before anyone else did. It could quite easily have gone the other way.
Characters being identical is very different than specific phrasing being identical.
I’d imagine it would be impossible for you to casually read a book then years later write a story that contianed 40 passages that were almost verbatum the same including arbitrary details like “170 specialty shops”
This is why I read works completely unlike any style of mine. I don’t want to fall asleep on a good line and wake up thinking its mine.
(But to be honest….those were some pretty exact lines. I’m kinda up in the air about it.)
I’m going to retract my comment above. Apparently there were 40+ passages in the book that were close or identical to the previously published work. I could see it happening once or twice (again, it happened to me) but 40+ strains credibility.