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Thursday, April 27, 2006

MehtaPhor

Courtesy Mediabistro, an AP story in which author Kaavya Viswanathan says she was shocked," shocked to see so many similarities between her book "How Opal Mehta..." and... well, you know the story. The NY Times has a nice piece on the "book packager," 17th St. Productions, now known as Alloy Entertainment. The piece contains the curious clue that one Claudia Gabel, a former editor of Megan McCafferty, author of the original books from which Viswanathan is alleged to have copied, then worked at Alloy during the genesis of "Opal Mehta."

But Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, the publishing company that owns Crown, said Ms. Gabel, who worked at Alloy from the spring of 2003 until last November, had left the company "before the editorial work was completed" on Ms. Viswanathan's book.

"Claudia told us she did not touch a single line of Kaavya's writing at any point in any drafts," said Mr. Applebaum, who added that Ms. Gabel was one of several people who worked on the project in its conceptual stage.

Mm-hmm, yes. But did she hire someone who did -- someone like the author quoted in this Harvard Independent piece on 17th St./Alloy?

Then, courtesy Galleycat, a link to a report in the Harvard Crimson (which first broke the whole story, last Saturday) on a personal appearance by McCafferty, who refrained from commenting on the whole thing. No doubt she has lawyers with hungry eyes on Viswanathan's half-million dollar advance.

You know, I don't care about the young, rich and very attractive Ms. Kaavya Viswanathan or her book. It's just entertaining to watch her and everyone around her twist clowly in the wind on this thing.

Anyway, you're wasting your time looking to my blog for info on this. Read Galleycat -- they're on it like a rug. And for even more -- see this entry on Old Hag, with its link at the bottom to a Slate article... This story has legs, folks.

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