Random House Pulls Ross Barkan's Mamdani Book After Plagiarism Findings
Random House has suspended sales of a forthcoming book about New York politician Zohran Mamdani after its author, Ross Barkan, was dropped by New York magazine over a plagiarism review that found attribution problems in 67 of his columns.
The book, The Revolutionary: Zohran Mamdani and the Remaking of American Politics, had been scheduled for publication on 6 October 2026. As of 19 August, it was no longer listed on the Penguin Random House website, Edelweiss (a industry catalogue used by booksellers), Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, or Walmart, according to the Washington Post (Washington Post).
The chain of events began on Friday, 14 August 2026, when New York magazine announced it had severed ties with Barkan, a contributing columnist, after launching an investigation into plagiarism allegations. The magazine told the New York Post that an internal review found 67 of Barkan's pieces contained improper "attribution of language, information and/or sourcing" (NY Post). New York magazine said it updated all 67 of those columns with corrections, the Washington Post reported.
Four days later, on 18 August, Random House confirmed it had suspended sales of the Barkan book following its own plagiarism review (Washington Post). The publisher is the largest trade imprint in the United States; Penguin Random House is its parent company.
The speed of the pull was striking. A book listed for pre-order across every major US retail channel on a Monday was, by the following day, unfindable on all of them. When a publisher suspends sales rather than simply postponing a release date, it signals that the book's viability — not just its timing — is under internal question.
Barkan is a journalist and political commentator who has written for New York magazine, among other outlets. The Revolutionary was to be his book-length profile of Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist member of the New York State Assembly whose campaign for New York City mayor drew national attention in 2025.
Neither Barkan nor his literary agent has publicly commented on the book's suspension. Random House has not said whether the title will be cancelled outright or revised and rescheduled.
The episode arrives at a moment when publishers face growing pressure to vet manuscripts for unattributed material, particularly in non-fiction drawn from reporting that first appeared in magazines and newspapers. A book that builds on an author's existing body of work inherits the scrutiny that that work attracts — and in this case, that scrutiny reached the author before the book reached a single shelf.
