BUSTED! Plagiarists, Fakers & Literary Hoaxes

[GinFizz]

It'd be like if someone decided to skate to a Gary Glitter song before his scandal broke...or maybe Milli Vanilli is a better comparison...

[chonies]

Has anyone else been following the story about Somaly Mam?

I read her book a few years ago and honestly I'm not surprised by the news. I told people at the time that it rang false for me, although for different reasons than the reporter found [psychic and/or lucky?]. The book was used as a campus readership program, and Somaly came to speak and had two of her girls with her, and then later some students went to visit her campus in Cambodia. I haven't actually had time to read the article, but I heard it on NPR the other day, so that's what I'm going on. Right now it's disappointing, and I hope it doesn't get worse.

[thneed]

Jesus, another one? At this point I'm going to assume anyone who works with an Asian charity that targets vulnerable children and has some dramatic backstory where they're kidnapped, tortured, and almost die is completely, 100% full of shit.

It makes me sad, because some of the worst-off people in the whole world are suffering and not getting access to real help because some people have to pretend to be heroes. I miss the days when the public liars were rich kids with fake drug problems.

[sumire]

Prolific romantic fiction writer exposed as a plagiarist

Laura Harner, author(?) of 75 books over the past five years, has been caught rewriting other people's male/female romance novels and selling them as her own male/male romance novels.

[Laira]

Jan 18, 2008 15:27:26 GMT -4 freddydingo said:

That Truman Capote/Harper Lee rumor is a load of crap. The thought that Capote, one of the world's most self-aggrandizing authors, would allow his work to be published with someone else's name, no matter how good a friend, is laughable. It's even less likely to think that he wouldn't have claimed the credit if he had actually written it after it won the Pulitzer. It's also not true that Harper Lee never wrote anything else. Her output was extremely slim, but it did exist.

I read Go Set A Watchman recently. Let's just say that either somebody else wrote To Kill A Mockingbird or GSAW wasn't written by Harper Lee. It's just too different, and quite frankly, terribly written to have come from the same author.

[chiquita]

It was an early draft, and they said Go Set a Watchman was published as it was found, so it never went through the editing process. There was a PBS episode about it (maybe American Masters?).

[Laira]

Editing process? More like a total rewrite.

[Deleted]

Plagiarism scandal in the crossword world! Apparently the editor of the USA Today puzzles may have been copying the NY Times crosswords. As a casual crossword player it seemed plausible to me that it was just a coincidence. How many different possible themes can there be? But puzzle editors say it is a huge deal so I'll take their word for it. Also its all one way. USA Today used the same themes and clues as NY Times but not vice versa. So yeah, probably something shady going on there. I don't know much about puzzle construction but it sounds fascinating. The issue of copyright for puzzles is pretty much untested. This is going to take me down a deep Internet wormhole.

[SGleason]

That makes me so angry! Good crossword constructors are rare, and they get their voice and wit into the puzzles. No way this was coincidence in my opinion.

[famvir]

I was trying to explain this to MrF, the humor in a really good crossword puzzle. I played one that was called "no ifs, ands or buts." One of the crosswords was California, but spelled Calornia (no " ifs"). How do these guys do it?