YA Plagiarist Conspiracy Just Won't Stop Giving

David Card | May 09, 2006, 12:12 PM

The NY Observer lobs this non-grenade into the Kaavya Viswanathan controversy:

“To me, all that stuff is such a black box,” said one author who has worked with the company. “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.”

What, pray tell, is "literary accountability?"

Get real. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, heck, the Shadow pulps, were written by committees. It's pop lit, children, accent on the pop, not the lit. Oh, and I guess that mysteriously unidentified source doesn't want to blow a potential Alloy package deal.

Look at the freaking glamor shot of the Harvard undergrad plagiarist that the Observer runs:

You think this is about art? or "memoirs?"

FORMER ALLOY EMPLOYEES AND OTHERS in the publishing world sometimes point out that the company is run by men—president Les Morgenstein, vice president of development Josh Bank and editorial director Ben Schrank—but that young women provide most of the grunt labor on Alloy’s book projects.

That graf comes after the Observer piece describes the story of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the bestseller written by "Ann Brashares, who was then co-president of Alloy," based on a concept by another Alloy exec, also a woman. But golly, last I checked, all the major talent agencies -- which is what Alloy is -- and most publishers, are run by men. Do you think teens run MTV, or kids run Mattel? Grow up.