When it comes to science fiction, there is a fine line for the suspension of belief. To truly sit within the science fiction genre, you have to have some element of realism with your science. Otherwise, it is simply fantasy (which is okay and I have no problem with this, but at least be honest with yourself). Real science fiction takes what we know about science and then adds the story on top.

To be fair, science has been leaping forward every day with new discoveries. Sci-fi writers only need to turn on the news for a brief moment before they are inundated with ideas for their next story. Many readers, including myself, LOVE this element of realism. Maybe it’s because I like a book that does exactly what it says on the cover. Maybe it’s the scientific mind, always asking and seeking a reason why. Either way, the love for realism in science fiction continues to grow, splintering off into the sub-genre, Hard Science Fiction.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler I’m always nervous when a book is set ‘just around the time corner’ with way too many similarities to ignore. This one is set in 2025 with a too-near future where climate change leads to violence, drought, and famine everywhere. Lauren Olamina is one of many struggling to survive, both the world outside and her personal condition: hyperempathy. Hyperempathy makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others. When fire destroys her community, Lauren must lead a group of refugees across the United States of America and not lose herself in the process. Although published in 1993, this book is absolutely accurate in its analysis of climate change and its potential impact on our communities and ecosystem. It’s hard not to be caught up in social commentary when science is right outside our door.

Food cozies are one of the most popular sub-genres of cozy mysteries including themes based on everything from ice cream to grilled cheese to cupcakes, and even a cannabis bakery! Food brings people together. Imaginary food, even more so. Plus, there are often recipes that you can really try. 

But how much do the cozies that take place in restaurants, bakeries, and other food establishments reflect the reality of working in the food industry? It’s important to know that this isn’t to point fingers at books that get it wrong but more as a thought experiment about the differences and more importantly, why those differences exist in the first place. 

I had the opportunity to talk to two mystery writers who have experience working in the food industry. Misha Popp, author of the delightful Pies before Guys series, started baking for fun before she decided to work at a bakery in Western Massachusetts, which closed after a fire. She returned to working on her own small dessert catering for people in her life. The second book in the series, A Good Day to Pie, came out in February.

Leslie Karst, author behind the Sally Solari Mystery Series, has worn many hats. She worked as a waitress through college, became a lawyer, and later went back to culinary school. She even got to cook for the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which is the topic of her forthcoming memoir, Justice is Served: A Tale of Scallops, the Law, and Cooking for RBG (April 4, 2023).

You must first internalize that it’s just not that big of a deal. People have different tastes; if someone doesn’t like the book you recommended, so what! Maybe they have bad taste. Maybe it’s not a reflection of you and everything you thought you believed about yourself, like that you have good taste in books and interesting opinions on literature and a thoughtful way of imagining what other people might enjoy. Maybe, it, um, says more about them than you? Or maybe it means you have just ruined a lifelong friendship and not only will this person never trust your opinion on literature again but they will probably never trust YOU again and they might even un-invite you to be a bridesmaid in their wedding which would not only be extremely embarrassing because you’re already on the wedding website but you would have to try and return that custom $300 dress.

Ok deep breaths, deep breaths are good, that was just the overthinking getting in your way of confidently recommending a good book to a good friend. Probably your friend will like it. If they don’t, probably they won’t even remember that you recommended it. Probably they will forget all about it. Unless…there is that scene in the third chapter that involves a cat getting stuck in a tree and your friend’s childhood cat did die four years ago. Oh my god, how could you have possibly been so insensitive? Your friend probably hates you now. Great. How many hours did you waste driving to visit her during college??? Maybe you would have passed intro to Spanish, except that she was having such a hard time freshman year and you wanted to be there to support her. And now that was all a waste because you didn’t even think through the potentially sensitive content in the book you recommended. 

Whew, that was a big one. Let’s acknowledge those bad thoughts and move on.

So, what I wanted to address in this piece is that there is no need to overthink your book recommendations. Say this three times in the mirror: “I have good taste in books. I am a confident reader and I can live with it if someone doesn’t like the book I recommended.” Would it even be your fault if someone didn’t like the book you recommended? Maybe they just didn’t get it. Oh my god, what if they don’t understand that it’s satire and think the book you recommended is misogynist. You might want to text Fred and find out if he gets that the book is satirical. If he misses that, it could be a real disaster. He must think you are a total idiot and completely clueless. “Why would she recommend a book by an author who clearly despises other women???” Oh wow, you really didn’t think this through. You just thought the humor and social commentary was so biting, but maybe if he doesn’t get it, he’ll think you didn’t get it in the opposite way? And then he’ll be all, “didn’t she major in English lit? Why would she recommend this dreck?” 

Okay, so that kind of thinking is exactly what you’re trying to avoid (but just FYI, you did text Fred and he does get the satire. Thank god!). Something that could be helpful if you tend to overthink is to have a set list of go-to recommendations. Books that have received critical acclaim and that you also enjoyed, so you have not only your own opinion but the critics to back you up as well. Although, what if then people think that you can’t think for yourself and you’re only recommending books that they could go find in the New York Times Book Review? That would be kind of embarrassing as someone whose “thing” is books. And what if you have this go-to list and you accidentally recommend the same book to the same person twice? They would probably be all like “what, has she only read three books? Why am I taking advice from someone who clearly barely reads herself?” That would also suck. That could really negatively impact the way people see you — they might think that you are just a bland follower, not confident in your own opinions and therefore not confident enough to deliver a speech at their wedding…

The Review has long been a fan of Thomas Demand’s work; our Spring 2015 issue featured a portfolio of his paper sculptures of cherry blossoms. His series The Dailies recreates quotidian objects and images: a coffee cup, a tray of cigarette butts. Only tiny flaws (pencil markings, tape) reveal them as constructions; otherwise his compositions are stripped of everything but their form. But paper isn’t just a blank canvas; it also carries meaning, even if these associations are subtle: it’s the medium of office workers, receipts, menus, greeting cards, origami, newspapers—and, of course, of The Paris Review. To accompany a selection of images from The Dailies, we talked to Demand about paper, literature, and the home.

INTERVIEWER

What does paper mean in your work?

THOMAS DEMAND

“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long,” William Faulkner wrote of his native Mississippi in his novel As I Lay Dying. “Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” There came a day when, as a reader of Faulkner, I wanted to see what he was talking about. If the tendency of things in Mississippi was to hang on too long, as Faulkner claimed, maybe the populace and the landscape would be more or less the same as they’d been when he wrote those lines in 1930. The drive from Brooklyn to his house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, was seventeen hours.

Five hours in, I made a pit stop at an abolitionist holy site: the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. John Brown’s raid on the armory, in October 1859, was one of the proximate causes of the Civil War. It enraged a plantation-owning class already frightened of northern agitators. “I want to free all the negroes in this state,” he said, referring to Virginia, where half a million people were enslaved. His plan was to seize guns and hand them out to men in the nearby fields, fomenting rebellion. With twenty-one followers, he stormed the armory and held parts of it for two days before U.S. marines flushed him out. All that’s left of the armory, mostly destroyed in the subsequent war, is the fire-engine house, which happened to be Brown’s final redoubt. He was captured there, and then taken to prison, tried, and hanged. I stood in the house; it’s the size of a two-car garage, dwarfed by the green, misty mountains that surround it. It drove home how tiny Brown’s force was, for it to have been able to fit inside such a small place—how inadequate to his stated task.

In Faulkner’s novella “The Bear,” John Brown appears without warning, in the middle of a stream of consciousness, and has a dialogue with God. He explains to Him that he, Brown, is unusual among men only in that he sees slavery for what it is, a “nightmare.” God asks, “Where are your Minutes, your Motions, your Parliamentary Procedures?” Brown responds, “I ain’t against them. They are all right I reckon for them that have the time.” Note that Faulkner makes God sound lame and officious, and gives Brown, an Ohioan, the locutions of a backwoods Mississippian. As a man of action, and as a person who acknowledges the true nature of things, Brown is a kind of honorary Southerner.

Faulkner called Lafayette County, his home, “the final blue and dying echo of the Appalachian mountains.” This is true. I followed the spine of the alpine chain southwest from the peaks of Harpers Ferry, where the weather was cool and pleasant, down through Tennessee, until the mountains dribbled away in the heat of northern Mississippi. Lafayette County was the last place where the hills were substantial. I drove an additional hour west to see the Delta, which was flat, consistent with its reputation. Then I turned around and drove to Oxford.

I was trying on brassieres at Azaleas, the one next to the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue. All the brassieres looked terrible on me. This is because I have very small breasts (which is okay, because I have absolutely fabulous areolas). I picked out one that was a very pale blush pink, and paid seventy dollars for it. Then my phone rang. It was my roommate. There were bumps all over her body. “They are very itchy,” she said, and asked me if I had them, too. I did not. When I got back to our apartment in South Brooklyn, I stripped my sheets off my bed. There was a large brown bug sunbathing on my mattress. I poked it with a pen. It made a movement that seemed to say: Ouch. I scanned the bed: there was a constellation of ink-colored droplets. 

The bedbug summer was in 2019. I had just turned twenty-three. I was working at Vogue as an assistant. I was making very little money. I thought I was punk because I would often show up to work with a gin hangover, plug in a pair of headphones, and play YouTube videos where various artists performed industrial music. I thought I was punk because all of my clothes were from the garbage or had been gifted to me by people who also worked at Vogue (okay, I did buy stuff, like the bra). I thought I was punk because I was dating a former child jazz prodigy who lived in a DIY venue in Gowanus with no shower, no kitchen, but massive windows, hardwood floors. A posh nightclub had opened up next door and I sometimes went there to pee because I liked the soap. It all made me feel very cool even though in reality it was pathetic. My boyfriend slept on a twin-sized cot inside of what was functionally an electrical closet. He was the first person I called about the bedbugs. That evening he took me to the nightclub and bought me a cocktail. He had a freckle inside his eyelid and it looked like a wet pebble. I was totally in love with him.

It was not a good situation. The next morning, there was a large man in my apartment. It was the Fourth of July. The man was wearing a hazmat suit. He was going to do what he called a radical intervention re: the bugs. It involved a breakthrough in technology. He had come from New Jersey in a Sprinter van. He met us at an ATM on Newkirk Avenue so we could pay him in cash. My roommate tried to blame the whole thing on me. And why wouldn’t she? She had a nice boyfriend in medical school who liked to cook her dinner. I told her that she was insane, to make me pay for the whole thing. This was New York City. Nefarious individuals could have come into our home during the night and sprinkled the bedbugs on our sheets. We had to at least get the landlord involved. The landlord called us gullible idiots and then said she’d split it three ways because the exterminator we picked was too expensive. The man left our house. I still was not itchy. On the internet it said not everyone was allergic to bedbugs. I liked this fact: I was some kind of biological miracle? I did not want to spend any more time in the bedbug apartment so I went to my boyfriend’s DIY venue and poured a bottle of Bailey’s into an XL Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee cup, and then we took the subway to Far Rockaway. 

After a few weeks, the bedbugs were physically gone, but I continued to see them everywhere. In my clothes. In my backpack, which I had taken to ironing at least twice a day just to be safe. I had given them to everyone at Vogue, probably. There was this thing where my boyfriend told me that a woman he used to fuck also had gotten bedbugs, not long before we started dating. I started flipping over the mattress on his cot to inspect it every time he went to the bathroom after sex. I would crawl around on the floor completely naked, aiming my iPhone flashlight at the ground, like a coal miner. I was subsisting on a lot of Cool Blue Gatorade and really cheap Thai food. Around this time I was attacked by a cat in a bodega. It became clear to me that my boyfriend was probably addicted to smoking marijuana. I had basically stopped letting people into my apartment, including myself. 

A few days before the Review’s new Spring issue went to print, the poet Rita Dove called me from her Charlottesville home to set a few facts straight. She and her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn, are night owls—emails from Dove often land around 9 A.M., just before bedtime—and they had just spent several long nights poring over her interview, which was conducted by Kevin Young and which spans Dove’s childhood in Akron, Ohio, where her father was the first Black chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company; her adventures with the German language; her experience as poet laureate of the United States, between 1993 and 1995; and her love of ballroom dancing and of sewing, during which she might “find the solution for an enjambment” halfway through stitching a seam. Working their way through the conversation, she and Viebahn had confirmed or emended the kinds of small but crucial details that are also the material of Dove’s poems: the number of siblings in her father’s family, the color of the book that inspired the poem “Parsley,” the name of the German lettering in which her childhood copy of Friedrich Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke was printed (not Sütterlin, it transpired, but Fraktur). We talked through her corrections, and then Dove produced a final fact that caught me by surprise. Two decades ago, she said, she had been preparing to be interviewed for The Paris Review by George Plimpton. He’d called to set a date for their first conversation, and the next day, she said, came the shocking news that he had died. 

This spring rings in the magazine’s seventieth anniversary, and twenty years since the loss of its visionary longtime editor. To mark the occasion, issue no. 243 has a cover created for the Review by Peter Doig—inspired, he told us, by a birthday card he made for his son Locker—and includes not two but three Writers at Work interviews: with Dove, with the American short story writer and novelist Mary Gaitskill, and with Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. In many ways, though, this issue is consistent with the others in our long history, featuring the best prose, poetry, and art that we could muster, by writers and artists you’ve heard of and some you haven’t. You’ll find prose by Marie NDiaye, Elisa Gonzalez, Rivers Solomon, Daniel Mason, and Elaine Feeney; poems by Nam Le and D. S. Marriott; and artworks including a portfolio by Tabboo!, featuring paintings inspired by words he associates with the magazine (including “high falutin,” “bon vivant,” and “wreaking havoc”). We are grateful to everyone who has appeared in our pages, and to all the people who have shepherded the Review over the past seven decades, so that this one can land in your mailbox as the season turns.

 

Note 19

Letters to the Editor: ‘Slips of the Tongue,’ Week after Week 

April 19, 1967

Well into my thirties, I was lucky enough to have friends with whom I could talk about anything. Anything—except the subjects of porn and masturbation. It had always been that way for me, outside of a few explosive arguments with ex-partners. The rest of the time we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t need to, because everyone was cool with it—or so our silence seemed to be saying. Except I was fairly clear that beneath this facade, I wasn’t cool with it—I’d almost never had conversations about porn, and because I hadn’t worked out my feelings and thoughts, I felt terrified to even begin. This seemed to indicate that I needed to bite the bullet and talk about it, and I imagined that other people probably did too.

So, over the course of 2020, when many of us were at home, I began to speak with friends and acquaintances on the topic of porn, recording and transcribing our conversations. Initially, I thought that if I published the chats at all, I would somehow incorporate them into essays—a safer and more literary and urbane strategy. Over time, I came to understand that these were conversations that needed to be presented as they were—in part to convince other people of the benefits of speaking about porn, and to give an insight into what those conversations could actually look like in practice. What follows are extracts from three of the nineteen porn chats I had.

 

ONE

This week, three reviews on damaged art, art out of time, art of our time, and enjoying the void. 

We’re in a particular phase of “pandemic art” now—I don’t mean work that portrays the spread of disease (I’ll leave The Last of Us to another writer) but the work that artists made while they lived in hibernation: writers at their desks with no social obligations to draw them out into the city, artists in their studios with the endless horizon of hours receding. Now they are showing what they made. Tara Donovan’s stunning “screen drawings,” on view last month at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, are a project begun in that period. The “drawings” are made from typical aluminum insect screens, cut and tweezed into intricate geometric patterns—layered lines, swirls, and cutouts—that shimmer and morph as you walk through the gallery. They are subtle optical illusions cut from the humblest everyday material. Their connection to the period of “high quarantine” strikes me immediately: time spent looking out the window onto silent streets, time spent feeling intensely aware of the need for protection. The discourse around “screen time” is of course fatiguing, but Donovan’s drawings for me reinvigorate the multiple meanings of the phrase. Before we came to understand the screen as the portal that brought the outside infinity into our personal space, screens were more often for keeping something out: a fugitive look, a bothersome fly. (I saw Donovan’s work around the same time as I became aware of an interesting but disquieting TikTok trend of overlaying TV clips with ASMR videos, in case you didn’t have enough stimulation.) What else do they continue to separate from us? A special quality of Donovan’s manipulations is that no photo of them can do them justice—they look good in two dimensions, but in person they are almost hypnotic in their immersive power. They’re hardly capturable as digital artifacts, and so much the better.

—David S. Wallace, contributing editor

For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Timmy Straw’s “Brezhnev” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase?

There’s a scene I used to picture a lot as a little kid in the eighties—two people dancing slowly, closely, their bodies seeming to know and anticipate each other, only they are also separated by a screen, so that neither has ever seen the other’s face. This was, I think, one way I understood the world at that time. This dance (so I imagined) is what formed reality itself—Reagan’s America, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union—and the dancers’ mutually blind position was like an engine, driving the world on. This made-up scene, and my adult memory of it, was certainly a major goad to the poem. So was a weird little detail—one of my older brothers could never understand that my one-year-old self was not, in fact, a teenager like himself, and so would read to me from The Annals of Imperial Rome and the most turgid high school astronomy textbooks. Because of his mania for geopolitics, he also taught me how to say “Brezhnev”—so that, awkwardly, the Soviet general secretary’s surname was one of my first words.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? Are there hard and easy poems?

For the cover of our seventieth-anniversary issue, we commissioned a painting by the artist Peter Doig, of a boy eating his breakfast beside a London canal. Our contributing editor Matthew Higgs spoke with Doig about his influences and fried eggs. 

INTERVIEWER

How did the cover image come about?

PETER DOIG

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As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen.

It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit.

Perhaps it was the intoxicating effect of the wine-flavored air, perhaps it was only the novelty of being so much by myself, but I fell that summer into a sort of enchantment, a sort of moody drunkenness, that troubled and frightened me more than a little.

I had led an active boy’s life. I had always been the typical young extrovert, delighting in games and the companionship of other boys, having little time for reading and abstract thinking, having little time for looking inward upon the mystery of myself, and so this dry summer on the beautiful lake, as I fell slowly into the habit of deep introspection, brooding and dreaming about myself and life and the meaning of things, I felt as though I were waking up from a long dream or sinking into one. I was lonely and frightened and curiously content.

 

Visiting Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, on exhibit at Princeton University’s Firestone Library from now through June 4, 2023, is like going to a sauna. You enter a warm, windowless space, and as you rotate your way through each experience, you find you’re dunked suddenly into something that barrages the senses—fire-singed early drafts, a detailed map, alternate endings for Beloved, the photograph that inspired Jazz. But it’s also like taking a cold plunge: you’re carried along on the continuous current of Morrison’s voice and work, and you duck out refreshed, tingling, alive with more possibilities than you’d realized there could be. 

The exhibit pays careful attention to the geography of imagined space, as well as the processes by which Morrison’s novels—which seem so inevitable in their final form—took years of wrangling, revising, discarding, drafting, and re-forming. In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison writes:

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”

The 2023 Women’s Prize longlist has been announced! After the 1991 Booker Prize shortlist was announced, then called the Man Booker Prize, and no women authors appeared on it, a group of journalists met and wanted more. Together, they founded the Women’s Committee and began the quest for starting a literary prize of their own, exclusively for women authors.

Now in their 28th year, the committee chooses what they deem the best contemporary works by women writers yearly to honor with the prize, announcing a longlist of 16 books, and later, on April 26, a shortlist of just 6 books. 

Chair of judges Louise Minchin said of the 2023 longlisted books: “[They are] a glorious celebration of the boundless imagination and creative ambition of women writers over the past year. . . . They all offer fresh perspectives on history and humanity, exploring hard truths with empathy, sensitivity, directness, and sometimes infectious humor.” This year’s judges, along with Louise Minchin, are Rachel Joyce, Bella Mackie, Irenosen Okojie, and Tulip Siddiq. 

The winner of the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction will be announced on June 14. 

If you’re looking for an anti-censorship group to get involved with, you’re in luck. There are dozens across the country, with more popping up all of the time. While there is certainly a need for a national push against censorship — we need politicians at the federal level to do something — work at the ground level in one’s own community is essential. Find below a roundup of anti-censorship groups who shared their information via this survey in early January. This information has been dropped into a Google Sheet, which you can save a copy of and use as you see fit.

This is, by nature, an incomplete roundup. It includes only the groups who shared their information on the survey. If you know of other groups, feel free to continue utilizing the link above to share information about them. In addition to developing this database of groups, those who share information about their work are given access to a suite of tools and resources to help in the work, thanks to our friends at EveryLibrary. Note, too, that not all of these groups focus solely on anti-censorship efforts; some are also focused more broadly on student rights and education but have anti-censorship as part of their mission and work. Not all groups have web or social media presence quite yet, but keep an eye out.

When you talk about grassroots efforts, look to the groups below. These are not funded by political groups or organizations and are not in the pockets of politicians. If you are in the position to get involved, do so; if you can’t, these are some places where you can also donate money to help the cause.

National Level

Comic Book Legal Defense FundFor the People: A Leftist Library Project (More details coming soon)Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)Red Wine and BlueStop Moms for “Liberty”

Arkansas

No Book Bans Coalition (Bentonville)

Florida

Citizens for Truth and Justice in Education (Central FL)Clay County Reading AllianceFlorida Freedom to Read ProjectFoundation 451 (Brevard County)Volusia Fight for the First

Idaho

Idaho First Amendment Defense GroupSociety of Secret Library Friends

Illinois

Illinois Right to ReadLibrary_defenseProtect Our Library (Lincolnwood)

Indiana

Hamilton County Against Censorship (Fishers and Noblesville)

Iowa

Annie’s Foundation (Johnston)

Kansas

Kansas Against Banned BooksSt. Marys Library Alliance (St. Marys)

Louisiana

Lafayette Citizens Against CensorshipLivingston Parish Library AllianceSt Tammany Library Alliance

Maine

Maine Library Association

Massachusetts

Mass Right to Read

Michigan

MI Right to Read

Missouri

Uturn in Education (Nixa)

New Jersey

NJASL/NJLA Regional Response Team

New York

No Book Bans Coalition (Brooklyn)PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program

North Carolina

Guilford County

North Dakota

North Dakota First Amendment Defense Group

South Carolina

Freedom in Libraries Advocacy Group (FLAG) (Greenville)Freedom to Read SCSouth Carolina Association of School Librarians

Tennessee

Right to Read Sumner (Sumner County)

Texas

Access Education RRISD (Round Rock)Children’s Defense Fund of TexasFREDom FightersGalveston County Library AllianceKISD Equity 4 All (Katy)Mosaic Community Library (Austin and Travis County)No Book Bans Coalition (Houston)Stand Up for Tomball ISD (Tomball)Texans for the Right to Read

Utah

Let Utah Read

Virginia

Loudoun4all (Loudoun)

Wisconsin

No Book Bans Coalition (Sheboygan)

Don’t see an organization near you? Use this guide to build your own local anti-censorship group.

Book Censorship News: March 10, 2023

Over 90 books have been pulled from shelves in Martin County, Florida, schools “for review.” You already know this is censorship and you already know it’s Moms for Liberty behind it. “Requiring book vendors to ‘rate’ titles with sexual content before selling them to school districts will be a priority for the Texas House, Speaker Dade Phelan announced Tuesday.” Remember how over 20 people were killed in a shooting in Uvalde last year in the same state? The Keene Memorial Library’s (Nebraska) decision to allow patrons to demand books be moved to other sections of the library is going to be a nightmare. A must-read about the way these book bans infiltrate and impact public libraries. This story out of Moon Public Library (Pennsylvania) shows how not bending to demand means the bottom line is impacted (a.k.a. retaliation). Article is, of course, paywalled, but I’ve broken it for you because this should be free. The state of school board meetings right now in Brevard County (Florida) and elsewhere. Turns out that the banning of The Upside of Unrequited from a Sparta, New Jersey, middle school came at the behest of a single complainer.This pastor is using his free time to complain about books at Robeson County schools (North Carolina)…and the paper is giving him space to talk about it. What even in the world? In good news, Sold and Last Night at the Telegraph Club survived their challenges in Flagler County, Florida.This Book Is Gay will remain on shelves in Hillsborough County schools (Florida). The Oklahoma legislative push to ban books from kids AND adults advances.Here’s a rundown of the latest Blount County, Tennessee, school board meeting on book banning and restrictions. Wareham schools (Massachusetts) apparently never had a book challenge policy prior to last month, and now they do. Policies like this should be standard practice; how these policies are followed is key to successfully combatting censorship. How Drag Storytime has come under fire in Jackson Heights in New York City. It should be interesting to see how Laramie County school board members (Wyoming) figure out how to define “sexually explicit” in their library policies.18 books have so far been pulled from Penncrest schools (Pennsylvania), with another 11 currently under review. The Livingstone Parish Library director (Louisiana) has decided to resign amid all of the book censorship controversy in his library. “This week, the Campbell County Public Library Board will be going over proposed changes to the library’s collection development policy. The suggested revisions were created by a Florida-based attorney affiliated with a national nonprofit organization. […] Liberty Counsel is a nonprofit organization based in Orlando, Florida, that provides free assistance and representation to advance ‘religious freedom, the sanctity of life and the family,’ according to its website.” So this Wyoming school district drafted a policy from a right-wing religious group? Separation of church and state does not exist.The new policies in Cy-Fair Independent School District (Texas) would restrict YA books to only middle and high schoolers, and any books “beyond” the YA designation would require parental permission. So that means even classics are inaccessible to teen readers?Pinellas School Board (Florida) will reconsider its ban on The Bluest Eye over the summer. Again, the proponents of these bills would like you to believe their opponents are perverts. Pedophiles and “groomers” who are titillated at the idea of showing pornography to children. I didn’t see anyone like that among the hundred or so quietly reading demonstrators at the Minot Public Library on Saturday, March 4.” An excellent piece about the quiet protest against North Dakota book ban bills in Minot. Let’s be clear: by putting this article about how Moms For Liberty behind a paywall, Lancaster’s newspaper is complicit in burying vital information from its community. This story is about Moms attempting to take over the Warwick school board (Pennsylvania), and I broke the paywall for you. Guess who puts their information out there for free? It’s Moms. It’s real neat how right-wing politicians are actually using children as pawns in their wars. This time, a Kansas republican claimed a 4th grader’s rainbow drawing was “proof” of indoctrination.Buried in this story is a debate over whether or not Gender Queer could remain in the Hastings, Minnesota, school libraries.The Faulkner County Library (Arkansas) canceled all of their public programs because bigots don’t understand how programs work, as seen after their anger over a Drag Queen event. A key part of this story is the director pointing out how much complaining about books there is and yet none of the complainers fill out the complaint forms. And here’s who is pushing to ban books in British Columbia, Canada…and the group fighting to preserve the right to read. The Duval County Public Schools (FL) supervisor of book reviews has resigned. Perhaps because her bigoted comments have now come to light? “A Wilson County man in a new lawsuit is accusing the Wilson County Book Review Committee of violating the Tennessee Open Meetings Act, as well as the First Amendment, by holding secret meetings to determine what books could be restricted or banned.” More of this, please. We all know about the Moms for Liberty list, so that’s not really interesting here. What is interesting is this is the first time I’ve seen books being challenged in Lonoke County, Arkansas.Greeley-Evans School District (CO) says the classic Beloved can stay in the high school library. Gender Queer will be able to remain in Hancock County schools (ME).When you read stories like this one, you just see how made up this entire book ban crisis really is (Pitt County, NC). A mother puts on a book crisis performance for the Montgomery County School Board (VA) over Flamer. They aren’t even creative in how they introduce their dramatics. Western Placer Unified School District (CA) listened to book crisis performers over The Hate U Give being used in 9th grade English classes. The executive director of the Shreve Memorial Library (LA) speaking against book bans and the “parental rights” that already exist should be a model for others. They keep calling Flamer pornographic which makes clear they have no idea what pornographic means (Collier County, FL). Regional School Unit 24 (ME) will keep Gender Queer and Queer in high school libraries.

In the high school library that I manage, I run a manga club that is very popular with the students. In the past eight years I’ve seen it grow and evolve with the students. Manga is by far the most popular kind of book we have in the library, especially with those who claim they don’t like to read “regular” books. From a librarian’s perspective, this is a win-win because reading is reading, if they’re reading manga all the better. You don’t need to lead them on to “real” books or to any other kind of reading if they don’t want to.

From my perspective, we have lots of kids who stick with manga for years on end and don’t stray to anything else unless they absolutely have to and this is perfectly fine with me. We’ve already written about great manga apps before, what I’m going to highlight below are the best manga web sites where you can legally read manga for free and sites that offer other manga related news or opinions. I see students reading manga on the computers in the library quite often and these are the manga websites that I recommend they use as I know how popular a medium it is.