Bestselling author Roxane Gay will no longer publish her forthcoming book with Simon & Schuster after the publishing house's decision to reportedly buy alt-right personality Milo Yiannopoulos' book in a $250,000 deal last month, BuzzFeed News reports. Gay's book, How to Be Heard, was scheduled to be published by the Simon & Schuster imprint TED Books in March 2018.
"I can't in good conscience let them publish it while they also publish Milo," Gay said Wednesday. "So I told my agent over the weekend to pull the project."
Many in the literary community have expressed distress over Simon & Schuster's plans to publish Yiannopoulos, who last year was banned from Twitter for hate speech. "I'm more powerful, more influential, and more fabulous than ever before and this book is the moment Milo goes mainstream," Yiannopoulos said in a December announcement of his book deal. "Social justice warriors should be scared — very scared."
How to Be Heard has not yet found a new publisher. "Milo has every right to say what he wants to say, however distasteful I and many others find it to be," Gay told BuzzFeed News. "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."