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
BANNED: ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’
The Cape Henlopen, DE, school board took emily m. danforth's critically acclaimed novel 'The Miseducation of Cameron Post' off the summer reading list for containing a word that rhymes… More
A Banned Books Wrap Up
This September, PEN American Center reached out to writers, editors, literary illuminati, and PEN staff to write about the banned books that matter to them most. Below you’ll find… 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
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