Prose off, window for a fairy edition: Story by plagiarist David Szalay in The New Yorker v. Fleming story

Monday 4/20/26

I'm not going to say too much here. The side-by-side comparison of the two textual examples speaks for itself. You will know this. I know this. Everyone in publishing would know this.

What follows is the start of a story--something that's theoretically meant to draw the reader in--called "Plaster" from a December 2024 issue of The New Yorker, put forward by fiction editor Deborah Treisman, approved by editor in chief David Remnick, written by David Szalay. Plagiarist. Highly connected. Without talent. One of them, as in one of them. Booker Prize winner. (From Wikipedia: "The Booker Prize is a literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. It is regarded as one of the most prestigious literary awards, and the winner receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost.")

A story by Szalay from spring 2026 issue of The Paris Review recently featured in another prose off in these pages.

Here we go with the piece from The New Yorker:

There’s some sort of holdup. Every day, they expect to fly out, and every day they are told it will be “another twenty-four hours.” They’re staying in a hotel with a swimming pool.

It’s not really hot enough for swimming. It’s not quite pool weather. It’s, like, seventy-five or something. Still, they spend most of the day poolside—there isn’t anything else to do.

The plastic sun loungers next to the pool face those towers—those three towers that look like spikes pointing at the sky, with a few blue spheres impaled on two of them.

István opens his eyes and sees them there, in the middle distance, pointing at the empty sky.

Usually in the afternoon a sort of light sleep comes. Sounds in a spaceless world take on an abstract quality.

Sparrows.

A passing helicopter.

Voices at different distances.

Something else, he isn’t sure what.

Sparrows.

He opens his eyes and finds things different. The shadows in different places. The quality of the light not quite the same, softer, more opalescent, and part of the pool in the shade, making the water there look flat and deep.

You want to have your last swim while the sun still has enough strength to warm you up again afterward. So at around four he stands and approaches the edge of the pool.

For a while he lingers there, with a sad feeling.

Then he dives in, and the water sloshes and gurgles in the drains at the side.

They have these vouchers they can use in the hotel restaurant, which always has a buffet.

They eat all their meals there. There’s a weird selection of things.

What there isn’t is alcohol.

There isn’t any alcohol anywhere.

Once or twice they go out into the city. There isn’t anything to do there, so they soon return to the hotel.

In the evening there’s the sound of the mosques or whatever.

They start up all over the place, not at exactly the same time but sort of overlapping, so that the over-all effect is slightly chaotic.

There’s something about it that he likes, though.

The air seems to vibrate.

This is an excerpt from "Dead Thomas," a work the people of this system, like these people at The New Yorker, would never let appear on their watch, at their venue or at their press if they can help it, let alone get behind it, push it, rightfully celebrate it as a unique work of art that no one else could produce in a culture and a world dying without these things, or even the possibility of them, by Colin Fleming. Pariah. Devil. Locked out. On account of greatness and not being one of them. Good person. Hurter of no one. Infinitely better writer. The word is "infinitely."

During lunch Thomas sat alone at a table with his palms facing the ceiling but as though the ceiling wasn’t there and instead the endless sky of night, a sky that causes you to feel like you need to pick out the right star for the most important wish of your life that you haven’t made yet because you were protecting it from not coming true. 

He may have been making an appeal to someone or something or trying to be beamed up, I honestly didn’t know, but that’s how he struck me. There were no windows in the cafeteria and I had doubts like I had my doubts about platypuses whether the sun was still in the sky or if the universe had swallowed it with Thomas’s arrival.

“Should we go over and talk to him?” Rachel asked me, as she folded an empty sandwich bag into smaller and smaller squares than you’d think was possible, something she did when she was nervous. It looked like a pill a pharmacist decided shouldn’t be round or a window for a fairy.

“He seems busy,” I said. “I think he just wants to die. Finish the process.”

“You have to complete it?”

“Sure.”

“I didn’t know it worked like that.”

“I don’t think it normally does. In rare cases.”

I considered saying something about how at least Ms. Kathleen hadn’t made a joke about being a doubting Thomas, which was a staple of hers, but Rachel wouldn’t have heard me anyway because she’d already risen and was walking over to Thomas’s table and it wasn’t like I could leave her alone with a dead boy, so I got up and went, too.

I saw this documentary about drowning and all the places in which it can happen to you—including inside of a glass, but that was just so they could make a warning about alcoholism at the end—and it turns out that many people drown because they’re trying to save someone else and get pulled under.

Maybe at the moment of Thomas’s ascension, or the precise second of his dissolving, he’d reach for Rachel’s arm—after all, that seemed the natural human reaction in a crisis, and I figured this qualified—and she’d be whisked away. But what the documentary didn’t talk about was someone trying to stop someone from drowning who was already trying to stop someone else.

Rachel sat down across from Thomas and introduced herself without pause, adding, “This is my friend Bonita,” in the same blurt-y breath, to which Thomas said, “You’re not Spanish,” and I answered, “I know, it means beautiful,” leaving out how my dad had given me the name which could make it sound like I was confirming myself as beautiful, but Thomas didn’t say anything further on the subject.

I hoped Rachel wouldn’t be gross or make a dumb joke but if I had to pick one it’d be the latter so I was a little relieved but still embarrassed when she said, “Why so glum, chum?” to which Thomas answered, “I’m dead, bitch.”

It was an uncomfortable moment. Some other kids came over to the table now that we’d gone first. After all, it isn’t as if any of us had ever experienced a talking dead person before let alone in the school cafeteria and it might never happen again. No one grilled Thomas, though. These were the quieter kids anyway. What some would call nerds. We were just hanging out, which can probably feel like a welcome break in the action whatever plane you’re on. 

It's impossible to deny the truth of what the contrast between the works of these two authors reveals about their different levels in talent and artistry. The first person can do nothing else; the second person can do everything else, better than anyone else.

The people of this system are giving the biggest honors and awards, the prestige spots/real estate in the "top" venues, the hype, to the person who wrote that first word of dreary pablum that might as well have been, and probably was, written by AI, which has nothing of the art of writing about it, nothing more stylistically arresting than something a ten-year-old could craft even in this world where ten-year-olds don't know their phone numbers or zip codes, and they aren't allowing the beautiful, meaningful, full of life, full of humanness, full of truth, work of that other man to be seen by anyone because they know how much better it is than what they publish and commend with their lies and how much better he is than they are as a person, how much more he knows, how much harder he works, how much more productive he is, how much more legitimate he is, his unbelievable range, how boundless his ability is.

I gave you the earlier example of another Szalay story. If you compare this story of his from The New Yorker with that other story of his from The Paris Review, you'll see they're written the exact same way. This is how he writes. It's this. Every. Damn. Time. He is incapable of anything other than this thing that isn't even truly a something.

You tell me: What makes that great writing? What makes him a great writer? Tell me: Anybody. Anyone in this world. You write me and you tell me.

And he's a plagiarist. For anyone who'd defend this writer, why don't you actually try and read him first, because I know there's next to chance you've read him at all regardless if you shout his praises. After you do that, why don't you fire up 1975's Barry Lyndon.

Oh. Wow. What do you know.

Plagiarist. That what you are, sir. Plagiarist.

Or what would you like to call it? Homagist? Meta-purloiner?

This is man without talent who has to steal to fill the page. Look at the paucity of his talent. His nonexistent talent.

Everything here happens for reasons that have nothing to do with the writing, save that bad, AI-machined writing from the right kind of person is what is touted, awarded, issued, nominated, etc.

No one gets a Guggenheim, for instance, because a single person on that Guggenheim board thought the writing was any good.

They look at who that person is in the pecking order of their system and the color of their blood. It better be blue. And the work better not be great, because great work makes small people quail and feel all the smaller despite the pumping up of their own egos which is how the try and cope and compensate, and more insecure and envious.

But if it's mediocre? Doesn't threaten them and is allowed to pass, allowing it has the right name at the top.

And all this is just allowed to happen?

Is anyone ever going to wake up to what's happening here? When is there going to be someone else who actually cares about the written word, about art and what it has to do with society, about reading, to even be interested enough to look into any of this?

Because that's all you have to do: Care enough to bother to look, and you will immediately know how corrupt all of this is.

But no one even cares that much, because no one truly cares at all. You have millions of dabblers who aren't even going through the motions of dabbling. Not so much as the tip of a baby toe in the pool.

It's all about being able to pin an ID badge on their chests that says, "I'm a writer" or "I'm smart."

They just want to be able to call themselves a writer, which nearly everyone in this nearly-across-the-boards illiterate world does, never mind that they couldn't care less about reading and have never read in their lives.

If anyone was serious about this, about being a writer, or the written word, they'd be aghast at how this system works. Horrified. And things would be happening. Changing. People being held accountable. Careers ending. Venues folding. New and better things rising from the ashes.

But it's just me.

What does that say?

All you need to do is look at any of this for five minutes or run a Google search with the name of an author and some crony, someone on a board, some editor, someone on a committee, and that will tell you why that person is in that magazine, or why they won that award, got that MacArthur grant.

This is exactly how publishing wants it to be, too. No one reading, no one caring. So these people can just keep being who they are, doing what they do, and getting away with it. They don't want anyone to give a damn about literature. Or just having a couple hours of pleasurable reading because you need that in your life and it makes you feel good.

And you knew he was going to look like this, complete with indoor scarf, because that's a part of it for these people as well.