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
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
Super-Mongrels of Indeterminate Breed
Our Freedom to Write Fellow on Banned Books Week and the magic, terror, and racism of Jack London's famous novella The Call of the Wild. More
The Banning of Sandpiper
I can write a letter or two and send off copies of the book to interested parties, but, as the arguments rage, I’m here in my office working on… More
Dignity of Lentil Soup
Michele Zackheim's profile on Russian writer and activist Stanislav Dmitrievsky, whose book may soon be banned by authorities. If found to be "extremist" in nature, Dmitrievsky himself will be… More
On Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
The problem of Emma is the problem of desire. Her only métier is desire, and its top percent, love. Emma lusts for gratification through commodity and body and makes… More
On Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”
I saw, for the first time, what it really means to be a poet—to have the habit of mind where the universe reveals itself through linguistic forms the way,… More
On D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
What scandalized (and scandalizes) conservative forces and even many of Lawrence’s colleagues in the literary world was not only Connie’s adultery, but the author’s failure to condemn the same... More
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