On Wednesday, Roxane Gay became the latest author to protest conservative Simon & Schuster imprint Threshold Editions's controversial book deal with Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, pulling her own book, How to Be Heard, from the publisher's TED Books imprint.
"Though TED Books and Threshold are vastly different imprints, they both reside within Simon & Schuster and so I guess I’m putting my money where my mouth is," Gay told Buzzfeed News's Jarry Lee. "Milo has every right to say what he wants to say, however distasteful I and many others find it to be. 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."
S&S had no comment on Gay's decision by Thursday morning, but the news follows a January 24 letter written by S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy and sent to employees and authors explaining the decision to greenlight the deal and the reported $250,000 advance paid to Yiannopoulos for Dangerous, which will release on March 14. That letter was purportedly in response to a letter sent by S&S children's authors earlier this month, which referred to the decision to publish Yiannopoulos's book as "getting in line with fascism and making it mainstream."
Gay, whose previous books include Bad Feminist (Harper) and Difficult Women (Grove/Atlantic), has yet to place the book elsewhere, Lee reports. She is schedule to delivery the Saturday, January 28 keynote address at ABA'a Winter Institute on the need to continue to diversify the publishing industry.
