An excerpt from “The Highest Form of Flattery? In Praise of Plagiarism” by Jeremy Gavron, posted in The Guardian:

 

 

The Highest Form of Flattery? In Praise of Plagiarism

The age of the internet, where everything is connected, has made plagiarism both easier to commit and more difficult to hide, as many a student has discovered. It has also exposed writers to new levels of examination, such as the recent allegations that Emma Cline, author of the best-selling novel The Girls, took ideas for the book from her ex-boyfriend’s emails, and the various claims that Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar contender, The Shape of Water, is based on a 1969 play, Let Me Hear You Whisper, or has copied scenes from two French films, Amélie and Delicatessen – allegations which Del Toro, or his representatives, have denied.

Two short stories published in the past few months also raise contemporary, as well as age-old, questions about influence and debt in works of fiction. Where exactly is the line between homage, reference, fair borrowing, and plagiarism? And is acknowledging such debts enough – or necessary?

“Foreign-Returned”, by Sadia Shepard, published in the New Yorker last month, tells of a professional Pakistani couple working and socialising in America. In an interview published online to accompany the story, Shepard acknowledged the “great debt” her story owes to Mavis Gallant’s “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”, itself published in the New Yorker in 1963, which tells of a professional Canadian couple working and socialising in Switzerland. “Ice Wagon” is a story she returned to “year after year”, Shepard said. In doing so she thought “this feels so Pakistani” and was excited by the idea of applying its “universal” truth to “a completely different context”.[…continue reading here]

An excerpt from the short story, “How It Ends: Unspeakable,” by Joan Silber, available at Scoundrel Time:

 

 

 

“How It Ends: Unspeakable”

I told Ina I would never speak to her again. We had been friends of a sort since our twenties—hung out in the same bars, showed up at feminist rallies and marches together—but she was increasingly one of those politicos who find fuel for neurotic rage in every fucking thing. And in the fall of 2016, she explained to me that Hillary Clinton was a war criminal, so she was voting for Trump instead. She wanted her vote to count. If Trump won, it would finally mobilize the Left.

Of course I didn’t stick to the not speaking. We lived in the same neighborhood, we said hello. (…continue reading here)

An excerpt from “The Best Hour of the Night” by Tony Hoagland, available in The American Journal of Poetry:

 

“The Best Hour of the Night”

After the guests have gone home
and the plates and glasses have been washed and put away
and the beloved retired to her bed,

I find that I am granted
this stretch of time
as open as a prairie or a favorite song.

I come into it like an inheritance
I did not know I had been waiting for,
or like a slice of cake… […continue reading here]

Two poems by Paul Otremba appear in The Account:

The New Republic of California

I was not remembering the Republic—the cooked egg expertly peeled and split,
a more perfect union toppled by a hair—because that was love they split.

It’s a problem with the math, being told to pick points on a map, then to imagine
your body in towns you’ll never visit, the distance constantly split.

On this side, a landscape of prisons, pox, slumping extractions of minerals;
on that side, prayer groups and quarterly projections, so hardly a good split.

. . . continue reading here.

C. Dale Young‘s poem “Portrait in Graphite And Ornamental Hagiography” appears in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day feature for October 13th:

Portrait in Graphite and Ornamental Hagiography

You may not believe it, but I have tried,
set my sights on the morning star
in belief it would guide me. I have tried.

I have tried, as the Jesuits taught, to be
singular, to be whole, to be one. The labor
of this was exhausting. Time reveals things

. . . continue reading here.