An Evening of Forbidden Books
Join Donald Barthelme, Richard Gilman, Thomas Gates, Jack Gilford, Richard Gilman, Andre Gregory, Margaret Hamilton, Nat Hentoff, Jamake Highwater, John Irving, Erica Jong, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Estelle… More
Sacred or Profane? On Bless Me, Ultima
And yet, I was only half Italian. I was only half Catholic. I was only half open to these ideas. I was only half. What could make me whole?… More
Sherman Alexie on Banned Books, Civil Liberties, and Masturbation
The bestselling author on surveillance, free expression, and--yes--masturbation in young adult literature. More
To Encounter Ocean Power
I can’t shake the image of young students—the gears of their minds at work—as they watch and take account, assess what it means to pull books from shelves, set… More
In Cold Blood: Practicing Our Humanity on the Page
In a great book, even the most despicable characters have a chance for redemption, perhaps, one might argue, more of a chance than he or she might get in… More
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Books with any kind of diversity are disproportionately challenged versus books by and about straight white males. More
Chill Blue Paint Box: Rereading Sons and Lovers
In 1975, Sons and Lovers meant to me the Gethsemane of emotional ambivalence—erotic yet ascetic, the stakes high as scripture, translated into genital dialect. More
On James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain
Whatever fear strikes any reader of Baldwin’s book awaits right in that opening paragraph: an unseemly portrait of faith. It is not literary sex, or violence, or the conflation… More
Animal Farm: Banned by the Soviets, Promoted by the CIA
Though the book cannot and should not be divorced from the Russian Revolution, Orwell sees beyond the specifics of that revolution, and even beyond revolution itself, to tell what… More
Why We Need Diverse LGBTQI Books
LGBTQI literature, while no longer taboo, still rests on uneasy ground in our school libraries. The tragedy, of course, is that young people are the ones who need these… More
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