I have months worth of release dates for books in one of my calendars, and now I find out that Simon & Schuster have made a $250,000 book deal with Milo Yiannopoulos. I won’t punish an author (or myself) by refusing to buy a book I had planned to purchase if published by them, but that will also have to be an end to any more books put out by them. I hope that authors flee them in droves for doing this. Not only is Yiannopoulos a person singularly without talent, he’s a known hack and plagiarist, which are yet more black marks against Simon & Schuster.
Not only is Yiannopoulos a well-known member of white supremacist circles, but he’s also a renowned plagiarist. As the Houston Press reported last year, his 2007 self-published book of poetry is actually composed of plagiarized Tori Amos lyrics. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed reported that most of Yiannopoulos’ work is written by interns. While denying the accusations, Yiannopoulos confirmed with BuzzFeed that he had 44 interns helping him with writing and research.
If Yiannopoulos wants to pretend to write a book, he could always peddle it to Sad Puppy Beale, who started his own publishing house. I rather doubt the money would be quite so staggering though.
The full story, along with a host of reactions, is at Think Progress.
I was going to say: it’s almost surely written by unpaid interns, like all of his other stuff.
One wonders how one would find the time to manage and direct fourtyfour interns and still find time to do some actual work oneself.
The answer probably involves job titles like ‘executive intern’ or ‘chief trainee’ and screams abuse of the purpose of internships, not to mention the interns themselves.
Fuck but that guy needs less public acknowledgement and fewer platforms handed over to him.