15 November 2011

Steal from the best!

Kirkus Reviews' best of 2011 fiction list included (I assume it will be removed soon?) the plagiarized thriller ASSASSIN OF SECRETS. (Excited for the inclusion of THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ, though.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's amazing how much was stolen from the other books...if he had been upfront with what he'd done, I wonder if the book would've been lauded as a deft pomo thing. Reminds me of an idea I've never been able to shake: if you took all the words in Ulysses (or Gatsby or whatever) and rearranged them into a different story, what would the result be? Maybe thrillingly just as great? That'd be cool.

Ellen said...

I hope it would be just as great, but it would probably take a LOT of randomization before it would even make sense. Jonathan Safran Foer did something not completely similar, but related, by taking a book called STREET OF CROCODILES and blacking out/obliterating pieces of text until it 'became' a book called TREE OF CODES. I think he had to say he had to retain a few character names though, because they were unavoidable.