12/8/2023 0 Comments Jason winston george naked![]() The book’s most obvious forerunner is Jonathan Lethem’s 2007 Harper’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” which was cobbled together from other texts (with a list of sources) as a meta-literary stunt. “It almost seems to be a kind of wikinovel, with so many other writers unwittingly forced to be contributors,” he noted. ![]() Thomas Mallon, the author of “Stolen Words,” a book about plagiarism, described “Assassin of Secrets” as “an off-the-charts case” both in the extent of the plagiarism and in the variety of Rowan’s sources. Rowan’s method, though-constructing his work almost entirely from other people’s sentences and paragraphs-makes his book a singular literary artifact, a “literary mashup,” as one commenter put it, or spy fiction’s Piltdown Man. Imagine a scale on one end of which are authors who poach plot ideas (Shakespeare stealing from Plutarch) and on the other are those who copy passages word for word: Jacob Epstein, who cribbed parts of his novel “Wild Oats” from Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers” the Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, whose novel plagiarized chick lit. Plagiarism was and remains a murky offense, “best understood not as a sharply defined operation, like beheading, but as a whole range of activities, more like cooking,” the English professor James R. It wasn’t until the Romantic era, which introduced the notion of the author as solitary genius, that originality came to be viewed as the paramount literary virtue. Roman writers subscribed to the idea of imitatio: they viewed their role as emulating and reworking earlier masterpieces. This wasn’t always regarded as a problem. Eliot to Harold Bloom have pointed out, ideas are doomed to be rehashed. Originality is a relative concept in literature. “I think he looks a lot like a guy who’s in serious trouble.” “Yes-in a photo shoot circa ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ ” “Is it me or does he kinda look like Alfred Molina?” someone wrote. Rowan’s author photograph showed a young man with puffy cheeks wearing a shearling coat, peering out from behind vintage sunglasses. He informed the book’s British publisher, and on November 8th, five days after the book’s publication, Little, Brown recalled all sixty-five hundred copies and issued a press release: “It is with deep regret that we have published a book that we can no longer stand behind.” “I quickly realized that the whole novel was ‘written’ this way,” Duns wrote on his blog. He found a sentence from the American spy writer Charles McCarry, and another from Robert Ludlum, the author of the “Bourne” books. Jeremy Duns, alerted by the Bond forum, began checking the text, plugging phrases into Google Books. Like a spy hiding in plain sight, “Assassin of Secrets” appeared to be a bizarre aberration: an homage to Bond that plagiarized Bond. ‘What’s it like to kill a man?’ the son et lumiere at ‘Frankie’s’ flat-entire paragraphs copied verbatim from John Gardner’s text.” “It’s all there, the ‘matched luggage’ . . . That day, another Bond fan wrote to the thread, “Why order a copy? Just read chapter 4 of ‘License Renewed’ ”-by John Gardner, who continued the Bond series after Ian Fleming’s death. it’s very Bondian.”īut, as in a thriller, no sooner had the book’s trajectory been established than it was reversed. Kirkus pronounced it “a dazzling, deftly controlled debut,” and Publishers Weekly wrote, “The obvious Ian Fleming influence just adds to the appeal.” On the James Bond fan site, someone linked to an excerpt, which the publisher, Little, Brown, had posted online, and wrote, “Anyone read this novel? I’m ordering it next month . . . Just before the book’s publication, in November, there were signs that it would be a hit: it had blurbs from the spy novelists Duane Swierczynski and Jeremy Duns (“instant classic”) and glowing early reviews. ![]() The author of “Assassin of Secrets” was a thirty-five-year-old début novelist with the pen name Q.
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