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

"I’m putting my money where my mouth is."
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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

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.

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