A cut-up exquisite corpse from the age of social media, Plagiarist retells Aesop’s fables by using appropriated or plagiarized Twitter messages rearranged according any given story’s form. Calling this form a cleptostruction, Habib describes the process (and contents) of his book: “Continue plagiarizing, stringing tweets together, one by one, until something recognizable in spirit to your entire source fable is cleptostructed. Present this cleptostruction alongside both an ordered list of the search terms used to build it, and, either a directly plagiarized copy, or a subtly modified re-telling of the source fable. Any jargon, abbreviations or symbolic text appearing in plagiarized tweets should be defined in a glossary.”
Thus the tale of the doomed camel, envious of the bull’s horns, becomes a freewheeling escapade involving the Kardashians; the wisdom of the fox, in evading the lion’s jaws, a cacophony of animal rights. Habib’s work is a reminder of the occasional pathos and unintended lunacy of communication in the modern age.