J.K. Rowling faces another plagiarism suit / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com:
It’s not the first time that Rowling, estimated to be the world’s wealthiest author, has had to defend herself against charges of plagiarism. One prominent case involved a 2002 suit brought by American author Nancy Stouffer who claimed that her character ‘Larry Potter’ bore a striking resemblance to Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter.’ Stouffer lost her case and an appeal three years later.
Mississippi Plantation Diary That Inspired William Faulkner Discovered – NYTimes.com:
The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel ‘Go Down, Moses’ comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their ‘scarred and cracked backs’ and ‘yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink’ — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.
Book Review – ‘Get Real,’ by Donald E. Westlake – Review – NYTimes.com:
The New York Times offers a review of Donald Westlake’s final novel:
After watching a bare-chested dentist trekking through the jungle by torchlight to shake a spear at a sunburned accountant in a loincloth, you might think television reality shows were beyond satire. But that would be underestimating the puckish wit of Donald E. Westlake, who died of a heart attack last New Year’s Eve but still leaves us laughing with his final novel, a rollicking crime caper that pulls the pants right off the reality TV industry.
Related posts:
Nonfiction Tweets: 70+ Authors to Follow on Twitter:
I’m so deeply entangled in preparing to do my dissertation research that I haven’t had time even to figure out exactly what Twitter does. But for those of you who are more adept at social networking than I, here’s a list of nonfiction authors who Tweet. The list includes some big names such as Deepak Chopra and David Allen (of Getting Things Done fame). This post also links to an earlier post listing fiction writers who Tweet.
Happy Tweeting!
This week’s Scout Report has a good round-up of items about the death–and life–of John Updike:
John Updike, Critic and Author, Dies At Age 76
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author John Updike Dies at Age 76 [Real Player]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99942825
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/remembering-upd/
For better or worse, John Updike produced a nearly endless stream of work
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-mew-updike-appreciate28-2009jan28,0,6965396.storyJohn Updike: This I Believe [Real Player]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99919409
Invisible Cathedral: A Walk Through the New Modern
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/15/041115crat_atlarge
Updike Desert Comix
http://harvardlampoon.com/?q=node/266http://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/hub_fans_bid_kid_adieu_article.shtml
This Tuesday, John Updike, chronicler of the American condition in the mid and late twentieth century passed away in Danvers, Massachusetts. Throughout his six decades of writing, Updike found time to write about the world of suburban existence (and ennui), colonial Africa, a Jewish writer in Eastern Europe, and a group of women living in a small New England Town in The Witches of Eastwick, and its 2008 follow-up volume, The Widows of Eastwick. Updike was always the polymath, and during his student days at Harvard University, he found time to write and draw cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon. He continued his diverse pursuits throughout his life, as he wrote a great deal of literary criticism for publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times. In an interview, Updike remarked that his primary subject was “Protestant, small-town middle class.” Literary organizations and institutions responded positively to his various narratives, as he was the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, and three National Book Critics’ Circle awards during his lifetime. [KMG]
The first link will take users to a news story from National Public Radio this Wednesday, which reports on Updike’s passing. The second link leads to a lovely selection of Updike remembrances offered by fellow literary travelers Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Theroux, Richard Ford, and others. Moving on, the third link leads to a reflection on Updike’s work and legacy by David L. Ulin, which appeared in this Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times. The fourth link will whisk users away Updike’s personal essay from 2005 offered as part of the “This I Believe” series. The fifth link leads to Updike’s assessment of the new Museum of Modern Art, which appeared in the November 15, 2004 edition of The New Yorker. The sixth link will take interested parties to one of the “comix” he created for the Harvard Lampoon during his stay in Cambridge. Finally, the last link leads to one of Updike’s most beloved pieces of writing (particularly for baseball fans), “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”. It’s a piece that describes the world of Ted Williams as he prepares for his last game with the Boston Red Sox, and it’s one that’s worth rereading, even if it might be the twentieth time. [KMG]
>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2009. http://scout.wisc.edu/
An Appraisal – Updike Made the Mundane Into a Saga – NYTimes.com:
Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters, moving fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.
More on this American author, who died earlier today.
John Updike, Author, Dies at 76 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com:
NEW YORK (AP) — John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir ”Self-Consciousness” and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for ”Rabbit Is Rich” and ”Rabbit at Rest,” and two National Book Awards.
Hollywood rarely did Donald Westlake justice – Los Angeles Times:
Roughly two dozen films emerged from Westlake’s novels or involved screenplay work by the man himself. But only two — 1967’s ‘Point Blank,’ based on the first novel he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark, and Westlake’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s ‘The Grifters’ (1990) — are clear standouts. Both films, oddly, were done by British directors (John Boorman and Stephen Frears, respectively) well out of the Hollywood mainstream.
‘When you read the books, your superficial sense of them is that they’re totally movie-ready,’ said Terrence Rafferty, a veteran film critic who’s written for the New Yorker and GQ. But adaptations of Westlake’s work, he said, range mostly from not very good to the ‘train wreck’ that is 2001’s ‘What’s the Worst That Can Happen?’ and the ‘absolutely dreadful’ case of 1974’s ‘Bank Shot.’
In its entirety, this article is a good tribute to Donald E. Westlake, who died at age 75 on New Year’s Eve. I miss him already.
‘Conversations With God’ Author Accused of Plagiarism – ArtsBeat Blog – NYTimes.com:
Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series ‘Conversations with God,’ recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com that was nearly identical to a 10-year-old article originally published by a little-known writer in a spiritual magazine. He now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually happened to him.
Oh dear. People who do this are always sorry–when they get caught. I stand firmly with Candy Chand, the woman whose work was lifted:
“I have strong issue with anyone who would appear to plagiarize my work and pretend it is his own,” said Ms. Chand. “That takes away from the truth of the material, it takes away from the miracle that occurred, because people begin to question what they can believe anymore. As a professional writer, when someone appears to plagiarize, they damage the industry, they damage other writer’s credibility and they hurt the reader because they never know what to believe anymore.”
And the fact that the man who got caught doing this is supposedly a man of God–well, I stand with Candy Chand on that point, too:
She added that it was ironic that Mr. Walsch in particular had been the one to appropriate her writing. “Has the man who writes best selling books about his ‘Conversations with God’ also heard God’s commandments?” she asked. “’Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie, and thou shalt not covet another author’s property?’”
Donald E. Westlake, Mystery Writer, Is Dead at 75 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com:
Donald E. Westlake, a prolific, award-winning mystery novelist who pounded out more than 100 books and five screenplays on manual typewriters during his half-century career, died Wednesday night. He was 75.
Aw, darn. The audiobook currently playing on my iPod is The Road to Ruin, one of the recent offerings in the Dortmunder series. Westlake has been one of my favorite authors through the years.
As this article points out, Westlake has written under several pseudonyms as well as his real name during his prolific writing lifetime. However, in recent years he has concentrated on the Dortmunder series, published under his real name, and the Parker series, published under the name Richard Stark. John Dortmunder is the leader of a cozy group of criminal misfits who come up with lots of big ideas but whose best laid plans always seem to go wrong, leaving them to bungle through somehow. The Dortmunder novels are in a subgenre known as the caper novel and are quite entertaining. Ya gotta love these guys. The Parker novels, on the other hand, are–well, stark. Parker is betrayed by his wife at the beginning of the series, and this sets the tone for the rest of the books. Everyone betrays everyone else, usually quite brutally. Guys who’ve done things so bad that their rivals put out kill-on-sight hit orders on them hire surgeons to give them a whole new face–then kill the doctors after the surgery to ensure they won’t talk. A long time ago I read somewhere that the idea for the Parker novels came to Westlake once while he was stuck on a bridge in New York City, his hometown. I don’t remember now whether Dortmunder or Parker came first, but Westlake conceived of the two series as direct opposites.
This article says that another Westlake book, Get Real, is due to be published this April. I hope it’s a Dortmunder.
