- Home
- Author Archive
On Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
It’s a luxury in our country that banning books is by and large an academic argument...[W]hen we have a discussion of “banned” books in this country, what we are… More
Call for Submissions for 2014 Literary Awards
The PEN Literary Awards are the most comprehensive in the United States. Each year, with the help of its partners and supporters, PEN confers more than $150,000 to writers… More
Immunization Through Fear: Banning R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps
I assert that the original Goosebumps series and all the subsequent spin-offs are so popular (over 300 million sold, making Stine the second most best-selling children’s author of all-time)… More
Australian Psycho
PEN staffer Jordan DeBor talks about the ban on Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho in Australia, where the book is censored for “graphic violence, sexual content, and its potential… More
Where the Wild Things Aren’t: On the Banning of Sendak
With his work Sendak acknowledges darkness and fear, and provides an introduction to complicated thinking, the basis for reason and, fundamentally, humanism. The very things that protective censors wish… More
from Rakes of the Old Court
“The precepts,” continued Pashadia, “of elementary good breeding state: neither the knife in fish and vegetables nor the fork in cheese, and, in no case, the knife in the… More
On Banning Barbara Comyns’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
I believe that one of the surest ways to enrage those inclined to censorship is to present a fictional world that requires the reader to provide the fictional world's… More
On Translating Athena Farrokhzad
[W]e are presented with a rigorously poetic exploration of migration, trauma, and intimacy, and although it may be seen as a document of a particular (immigrant) experience, Vitsvit is… More
Sharing Your Truth
Novelist and former PEN staffer Nick Burd kicks off our second annual Banned Books Month with some insight into the banning of his novel, The Vast Fields of Ordinary.… More
Support for the freedom to read with exclusive designs by Todd Parr, Mike Curato, Art Spiegelman, and more!
