Entertainment

Roxane Gay pulls her latest book from Simon & Schuster amidst Milo Yiannopoulos Controversy

"I’m putting my money where my mouth is."
By Martha Tesema  on 
Roxane Gay pulls her latest book from Simon & Schuster amidst Milo Yiannopoulos Controversy
Roxane Gay accepts her Freedom to Write Award at the PEN Center USA's 25th Annual Literacy Awards Festival at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on Monday, Nov. 16, 2015, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision for PEN Center USA/AP Images) Credit: Matt Sayles/Invision/AP

One more person has come forward against publishing house Simon & Schuster.

Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State, joins Leslie Jones, Bradley Trevor Greive and others in criticizing the publisher for granting Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos a book deal.

Gay recently revealed on Twitter this week that she would be pulling her latest book from Simon & Schuster's roster.

Yiannopoulos, who is best known as an alt-right troll banned from Twitter, secured a controversial $250,000 deal to publish Dangerous, and despite claims reported by Buzzfeed that the book would not include hate speech, Gay withdrew her book, How to Be Heard, from S&S imprint TED Books.

In a statement to Buzzfeed, Gay explains her decision.

"I was supposed to turn the book in this month and I kept thinking about how egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation," Gay wrote. "I just couldn’t bring myself to turn the book in. My editor emailed me last week and I kept staring at that email in my inbox and finally over the weekend I asked my agent to pull the book."

She explained that this was beyond censorship, but rather "putting my money where my mouth is."

"Milo has every right to say what he wants to say, however distasteful I and many others find it to be," she continued. "He doesn’t have a right to have a book published by a major publisher but he has, in some bizarre twist of fate, been afforded that privilege. So be it."

"I’m not interested in doing business with a publisher willing to grant him that privilege. I am also fortunate enough to be in a position to make this decision. I recognize that other writers aren’t and understand that completely," Gay wrote, before praising the editor of TED Books.

How to Be Heard, which was to be released in spring of 2018, and has yet to be placed with another publisher.


Recommended For You

Joe Rogan and Oprah's bestie caught texting with Elon Musk over Twitter buy

Amazon's 'ambient intelligence' is a cozy way to say home surveillance

Meta's Make-A-Video AI is Dall-E for video clips


Google's killing off Stadia but at least you'll get your money back

Trending on Mashable

Wordle today: Here's the answer, hints for September 30

Wordle today: Here's the answer, hints for October 1

Who is Adar in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'?

What does 'Udûn' mean in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'?

What's so controversial about Netflix's 'Blonde'? Well...
The biggest stories of the day delivered to your inbox.
By signing up to the Mashable newsletter you agree to receive electronic communications from Mashable that may sometimes include advertisements or sponsored content.
Thanks for signing up. See you at your inbox!
https://mashable.com/article/roxane-gay-simon-and-schuster
mashable.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-40
100027
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PNFCYAFNXPJZW6GYAFIEKSMQJCXOWTOZ
<urn:uuid:02d3be7c-68c3-4feb-9ee0-ea3a3ece3554>
2022-10-01T04:41:22Z
172.64.151.113
text/html
sha1:WVXVNWKN64OTERUAYXYX2JBVDOB7PV7K
<urn:uuid:55b269b0-019f-4fa8-8cd6-0c5216a45fa6>
https://mashable.com/article/roxane-gay-simon-and-schuster
response
<urn:uuid:ad604bfe-a98f-41b1-849c-a867ead6512e>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September/October 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-88
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/