Number Six of the Eleven Calamities
Someone would ask me how I was and I would promptly answer “prose.” You’d look down at the inscription I’d written and somehow it would only say “prose.” Prose… 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
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
Letter to My Grandnephew
I have a little yellow plastic bead shaped like an elephant. It is standing on a small red, hexagonal box that sits on top of my TV set. The… More