Librotraficante “Book Traffickers” Ensure Equal Access to Diverse Books in the Face of Discriminatory Arizona Law
Librotraficante is doing necessary work to ensure that the many voices, groups, and histories included in the American experience are fully represented and heard. More
Fatima Shaik: ”Books Like These Are Meant to be Troubling”
On Tuesday, December 6, the Accomack County Public Schools Board, in eastern Virginia, voted to return the books To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn to county classrooms. The… 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
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
Reservation Sunsets and ‘Salem’s Lot
Maybe the banning advocate truly is the 13 year old, terrified that his secret life is out, that some novelist had looked into his private world and reported from… More