Not quite recovered from having Michiko Kakutani serve her her ass on a plate, A.M. Homes gets another mini-beating in this week's Times Book Review, courtesy of Walter Kirn, who calls Homes a "Streisandist." Why Walter, you just coined an awesome new insult! Well done! After the jump, Intern Alexis muses on Streisandism, happy books, and scary turtle pictures in her weekly guide to sounding like you read.
• Howell Raines' new book — The One That Got a Way — has an unoriginal title. [WWD]
• Bidding for Plame memoir reaches seven figures. And it sounds like the Howell Raines book party was boring. [NYP]
• People named Time Inc.'s mag of the year, for its excellent coverage of, among other things, the ill-fated Zellweger-Chesney nuptials. [WWD]
• More investors are shorting Times Co. stock. Oh, poor Pinch. [NYP]
• ABC anchor Bob Woodruff's recovery continues, but it's still unclear when he'll be able to return. [LAT]
• More evidence 750 Third Avenue will rival 4 Times Square in coolness: New cafeteria will offer sushi bar, custom salad station, international specials. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Well-hung Clinton to speak at News Corp. retreat. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Forbes editor Bill Baldwin doesn't read Jon Friedman's column. [MW]
• Valerie Plame is shopping a book proposal. As if we needed more proof that getting outed was the best thing to ever happen to her. [NYT]
• As RS turns 1,000, Jann Wenner is rich, neat, and happy. And has a sty in his eye. [WP]
• Shocker: Next audit report will show newspaper circ falling more. [E&P]
• Conde Nast is not trying to buy Rodale, nor vice-versa. [WWD]
• The Postal Service wants to increase rates on mags again, after a previous rate hike in January. Clearly, the Postal Service also wants no one in this business to ever have gainful employment again. [Folio:]
In today's Observer, Sheelah Kolhatkar goes spelunking about Alloy, the book packaging company responsible for Kaavya Viswanathan's impressively plagiarized debut novel. Aside from developing ideas in-house and then not allowing their originators to write the resulting books, Alloy books are often written by multiple ghostwriters. In the case of Opal Mehta, a multi-author approach would explain why the thing seems to be cribbed from some 32 different sources.
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.
Because several of you have asked, we checked in with Gawker's Cambridge correspondent for a definitive answer:
From last night's Publishers Marketplace deal report:
The Times reports today that Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan seems to have plagiarized from a third work, Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret? Last week, Viswanathan confessed to "unintentionally" plagiarizing the work of Megan McCafferty, whose words appear in Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life in more than 40 separate passages. Publisher Little, Brown has since ordered stores to pull Viswanathan's book from the shelves.
Is the Times Book Review experiencing some sort of cranky Groundhog's Day? We have to ask, given that they've allowed reviewers to make impossibly unfair comparisons of their subjects to HRH Joan Didion for two weeks in a row. Of course nobody's Joan fucking Didion — is it really necessary to deliver an extra slap in an already unfavorable review by name-dropping? Yeah, we're talking to you, Kurt Andersen. Intern Alexis tackles that, plus the formal fellating of Gary Shteyngart, in her weekly guide to sounding halfway literate.
We wanted to read New York mag's article today on Howell Raines, his new book, and his post-Times life. Really we did. But then we got to the full-page portrait that opens the feature and, man, we just couldn't get any further. Are we appalled? Are we intrigued? Is it the jowls? Is it the nose? Is it the dark, penetrating eyes? We have no idea. But we haven't been able to look away.
We've just received a spamming of invites for Post fashionista Danica Lo's forthcoming book, How Not to Look Fat. Inspired by her instructive columns on the same topic, the Harper Collins website has a choice blurb:
• Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan gets spanked for plagiarizing her debut novel. Little, Brown enters shame spiral for having given an underage hack a two book, $500K deal — they cope by pulling her bestseller from the shelves.
• People names its "beautiful people" and is rumored to have shelled out some $700K for access to the Brangelina.
• As Rolling Stone's 1,000th issue party draws near, some Wenner proles lament their lack of invites. At least RS staffers scored the golden tickets.
• Rosie O'Donnell is slated to replace Meredith Vieira on The View, ensuring that the show is a must-see for those looking for some morning show bloodlust.
• Time's top dog Jim Kelly may be moving on as early as June. Oh, Santa, please don't go.
• In other speculative job changes, is Lloyd Grove considering ditching the Daily News for the Post and Page Six?
• Thank God it's spring — media softball is back, and just as mandatory as ever.
• You can see Anderson Cooper's memoir, but they'll have to kill you afterwards.
• Gawker mascot Andrew Krucoff gets a new job at the 92nd Street Y, meaning that our consciences may finally rest. For now, anyhow.
• If there's one sort of error from the Post that we can never, ever forgive, it's misreporting the size of Bill Clinton's penis. This is America, people — knowing presidential cock is like knowing the Pledge of Allegiance.
Daily Candy editor-at-large Dannielle Romano grabs hold of DC founder Dany Levy. We fear we have pictures of Dannielle displaying similar enthusiasm for us.
Patricia Clarkson, A.M. Homes, and some other chick we don't recognize. Not a bad crowd for just another downtown party.
We learned yesterday that our college roommate's uncle's brother's camp friends' mother's dog-walker's daughter's babysitter's agent has a copy of the eagerly, desperately, hungrily awaiting Anderson Cooper memoir, Dispatches From the Edge. So exciting! How soon, we asked, can we take a glimpse at this delicious morsel? And then we learned the sad news: We cannot. Why not? Because everyone who has received a copy of this august tome — which, as we've heard from several sources, is neither particularly weighty nor particularly interesting — has signed a lengthy confidentiality agreement promising that they will not reveal its content to anyone. Indeed — and this is probably our favorite part — while reporters who have received a copy of the book are generously permitted to discuss the book for "reporting and/or fact checking purposes," but, unless they have HarperCollins' "express written approval," they're not allowed to do that reporting and/or fact checking with anyone other than Anderson himself. Genius!
We've all spent a fair deal of time analyzing, pondering, lamenting and/or scoffing at the situation of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore who, after receiving $500K for a two-book deal, has been accused of plagiarizing passages in her debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. But someday, the current controversy will be a thing of the past, and what then of young Kaavya? There is, of course, a very young woman at the center of all this.
Rush & Molloy report today that former gossip Deborah Schoeneman was looking nervous the other night "when she heard that some of her former colleagues from the New York Post" were at the same party. Her gossip industry roman clef, 4% Famous, details the unflattering exploits of "Column A," particularly those of its freebie loving editor and his drugged up successor, "Tim." Purely a work of Schoeneman's imagination, of course.
Though Kaavya Viswanathan has confessed to being subconsciously "influenced" by the work of Megan McCafferty to the point of reproducing passages from McCafferty's books for her own bestselling debut How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, there's still literary chatter to suggest there's more to the story than just that. In particular, a former TA of Viswanathan writes, "Kaavya was my student last spring (in a section where I was a TA). I was surprised to learn she had written a book, as her writing was awful- I had given her low grades on her papers."
