LA CARTE, Le territoire, Wednesday (Le Monde Petit) — Michel Houellebecq has angrily denounced as “incompetents” anyone noticing that large chunks of his latest novel Messieurs, démarrez vos photocopieurs were directly lifted from Wikipedia.

The book, published last week, was acclaimed as a “work of genius” by the newspaper Libération. “Specifically,” it noted, “other people’s genius.”

“If these people really think that passing off other people’s work as one’s own is ‘plagiarism,'” said Mr Houellebecq, “they haven’t got the first notion of what literature is. Taking other people’s stuff and making money from it is part of my method. It’s a form of beauty, money.”

Unlike his previous books, the new one contains no attacks on Islam and no overt misogyny, though it does note that BUSH IS GAY LOLOLOL.^{[citation nécessaire]} However, its neutrality and notability have been questioned.

“Using a big word like ‘plagiarism’ always causes some damage,” he complained. “There will now be people who think I’m the sort of person who takes other people’s work uncredited, just because I take other people’s work uncredited.”

Mr Houellebecq has angrily withdrawn from publicity for the novel to concentrate on his next original work, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.