Five Literary Deep Dives for Your Fill of Publishing Drama
Photo credit Jo Ramsay
A good literary feud only happens once every few years. But when it happens, it takes the internet by storm. Maybe you watched the drama unravel live on Twitter, or maybe you ate up the articles that were published after. And if you missed them, we’ve got you. Maybe you’re familiar with a few of these, but you don’t know the literary industry until you’ve been thoroughly obsessed with each of these deep dive-worthy dramas.
A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions — The New Yorker
If you’ve been asking the universe where men get the audacity, prepare to beg the question on a whole other plane.
You might know Dan Mallory by his Gone Girl-inspired pen name, A.J. Finn, but before The Woman in the Window was an international bestseller, he exercised his creative muscles by lying his face off to advance through the ranks at publishers in London and New York, such as Random House and HarperCollins. Mallory created such a reputation for himself in the publishing world that once his identity was revealed mid-way through the auction process for The Woman in the Window, all but one publisher pulled out.
Among the uncountable tall tales, he’s fabricated an Oxford degree and professorship, a dead brother and mother, an English accent, as well as brain cancer. He’s also suspected to have placed cups of his own urine in and around his boss’s office. What’s more infuriating is that, similar to Anna Delvey, Mallory doesn’t appear to even be all that good at lying.
This article in the New Yorker by Ian Parker unravels like an old-school detective mystery where things just don’t add up and you’re along for the ride as Parker does the math. Despite being caught red-handed a number of times, Mallory, like many cartoon villains, seems to just keep getting away with more and more. One can’t help but wonder how many other Dan Mallory-types are in senior positions in publishing right now.
Is it wrong of me to be pleased that Women in the Window’s Netflix adaptation starring Amy Adams flopped? No. No it is not.
The Spine Collector — Vulture
Let’s be real. It’s really hard to spot the difference between “penguinrandomhouse” and “penguinrandornhouse.”
While there are now countless articles about Filippo Bernardini’s manuscript heists after the FBI arrested him in NYC, this deep dive by Reeves Wiedeman in Vulture about the then-unknown culprit was published coincidentally just months before he was apprehended. Suspected to be an industry insider, folks in publishing didn’t know who to trust as the impersonations grew more grand and aggressive. The article reads a little like a literary work with mounting tension and mystery perhaps akin to a spy thriller.
Just this past January, Bernardini pleaded guilty to stealing the unpublished books, but the kicker is that we still don’t know why he did all of it. None of the stolen manuscripts were leaked online and no ransom was demanded. What’s so captivating about this drama is how much effort Bernardini put into stealing over 1,000 manuscripts over the span of four years by creating more than 160 fake email domains for reasons unknown.
As the Vulture title asks, “Is it espionage? Revenge? Or a complete waste of time?” To me, it’s looking like the latter, and that’s kind of my favourite part of all of it. There are some theories of how these capers could have been used to advance his career in small ways, almost insignificant ways, but the fun is for you to read the articles and come up with your own theories while learning the ins and outs of publishing along the way.
Just this past January, Bernardini pleaded guilty and he’ll be sentenced in April. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
Who is the Bad Art Friend? — New York Times
Picture two writers: One posts about her good deeds on a public Facebook page and expects her successful writer friend to pay attention to her selflessness, the other (the successful writer friend) doesn’t consider them friends at all… but also wrote a story about it.
Similar to Sonya Larson’s book, The Kindest, “Who is the Bad Art Friend?” acts something like a Rorschach test for readers as one’s take on who the truly bad actor is here is polarizing to say the least — just ask Twitter or take a look at the review bombs on Larson’s GoodReads. Yeah, it would suck to see your life satirized in the work of someone you thought you had a connection with, but it’s also quite intense to have your group chats subpoenaed in a revenge plagiarism lawsuit.
Dawn Dorland, who very publicly donated one of her kidneys, took great lengths towards getting retribution when she recognized herself in The Kindest in what is not the most flattering portrayal. After the dust had somewhat settled on a lengthy legal battle, Dorland was the one who reached out to the article’s author, Robert Kolker, to write the article. To Kolker’s credit, his portal of both Dorland and Larson are equally neutral and unsympathetic, but it’s hard to say whether Dorland came off the way she had hoped given the backlash to both women.
It’s common for writers to draw inspiration from real life to weave into their fiction, but in this article we can also see how it can be every writer's nightmare for the people you drew inspiration from to recognize themselves and not be happy about it. Do you think including details of other people in your fiction work is all part of the creative process and fair game? Or is it borrowing without asking? Be prepared to ask these questions again in our next deep dive below…
“Cat Person” and Me — Slate
“Cat Person” — written by Kristen Roupenian and published in the New Yorker in December 2017 — is still the most talked about short story and the first to go viral. Its portrayal of a young sophomore student dating, and then ghosting, a guy in his 30s that she met at a movie theatre enraged many men in particular as they felt he was treated unfairly. On the flip side, many women saw their own experiences reflected in this exploration of the “nice guy” archetype and the experience of dating an older, insecure man.
Well, conversations around the short story came up again when Alexis Nowicki came forward, saying that the short story was based on a relationship she had. Meeting at a movie theatre, bonding over cats, living in Ann Arbor, the same age difference? The biographical details were so precise that Nowicki’s phone exploded with texts when “Cat Person” was published as many believed she was secretly the author.
Nowicki’s brilliant article guides the reader through this curious mystery in how she did not know Roupenian, but it felt as though Roupenian knew her. Was Roupenian borrowing a bit of inspiration that she had perhaps heard through the grapevine? Or was it pure coincidence that “Cat Person” so closely mirrored Nowicki’s experience in the first half of the story? If Roupenian did borrow Nowicki’s story, should she have been allowed to?
Before Nowicki’s article, many readers had accused Roupenian of writing autobiographically about her own experiences. But it’s a bit of a slap in the face when writers, especially female writers, are accused of their fiction being too real to be invented or achieved through craft, discipline, and imagination. I won’t spoil the final, heartbreaking twist in Nowicki’s account, but this story raises interesting and important questions about autofiction and artistic license that will have you and your friends talking for hours.
The Making (and Unmaking) of a 23-Hour New York Times Best Seller — Vulture
We’d all like to be New York Times Bestsellers—it’s essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you make the list, you’re sure to sell more books than ever before thanks to the boost in publicity. When author Lani Sarem pursued a brilliant but ridiculous scheme to get her YA book, Handbook for Mortals, on the bestseller list in hopes of an eventual movie deal, she not only pulled off a Cohen Brothers-esque plan, but also inadvertently exposed the silly system that lands books on the NYT bestseller list in the first place.
Handbook for Mortals had sold 18,000 hardcover copies in its first week of release alone, a smashing success by industry standards. But the funny thing was that hardly anyone had even heard of Sarem’s book. Other YA authors donned their deer-stalkers and took the investigation into their own hands. As Lila Shapiro’s Vulture article says, “The reaction on Twitter was swift and unsparing.”
Of all Sarem’s alleged crimes — which included bad writing and a plagiarized book cover — was her hiring ResultSource, a company that runs marketing campaigns aimed specifically at gaming the best-seller system. Within 23 hours, the NYT removed Handbook for Mortals from its list. It was a swift ending for the book’s moment of glory, but the build-up and shady dealings that led up to it are nothing short of fascinating.
With the vibe of Fargo, which features a colourful cast of characters bumbling their way through a darkly humorous romp, Sarem does what she can to make her literary and film ambitions come true by seeking out help from one of the virgins from American Pie, the guy who played Jasper Hale in Twilight, and, of course, the mysterious ResultSource.
In addition to being deliciously entertaining, Shapiro’s article is a great reminder that bestseller lists are a bit bullshit. And I, for one, would do anything for a film adaptation of this whole saga in the style of I, Tonya or Zola.
Jo Ramsay
is a Canadian media and publishing enthusiast who works as a literary assistant at P.S. Literary Agency as well as the editorial director of Shrapnel Magazine. She’s worked in publishing for over six years at places such as Simon and Schuster, Arsenal Pulp Press, PRISM International, Greystone Books, and This Magazine. She’s lived in Canada, the UK, and Japan.