"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. 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. “It almost seems to be a kind of wikinovel, with so many other writers unwittingly forced to be contributors,” he noted. 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. Other commenters compared Rowan to musical samplers such as Girl Talk and Danger Mouse, and to Kathy Acker, whose postmodern novels use plagiarism to make a statement about what Roland Barthes called “the death of the author."
— The Plagiarist’s Tale, The New Yorker.
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