Academics still disagree on whether this was really an instance of plagiarism; in 2013, it became apparent that Vice had been one of the victims of a minor writer turned Wikipedia editor.
"[5] Publishers Weekly agreed: "Vice has a gift for making the extraordinary plausible, for rendering complex motivations in spare but metaphoric language and searing details.
"[6] When the University of Georgia Press discovered that one of the stories in The Bear Bryant Funeral Train incorporated material from a short story by Carl Carmer, the Press accused Vice of plagiarism, revoked the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award, and destroyed unsold copies of the book.
Science fiction author Jason Sanford defended Vice[7] in the quarterly journal storySouth, describing the affair as a "literary lynching".
According to a report in The Oxford American, "The revised version will more closely mirror Vice's 2001 dissertation from the University of Cincinnati, which contained many of the stories that ended up being published as The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.
[12] In May 2013, Salon.com reporter Andrew Leonard revealed that Brad Vice had been the victim of a "ferocious assault" by Robert Clark Young, a writer who spent years anonymously attacking his literary enemies by inserting "revenge edits" into Wikipedia.