As the new school year kicks off — or is already in progress in many places — it’s worth taking a look at the states which have enacted laws that ban books. This guide is not comprehensive, but gives an overview of the legislation currently on the books that will impact how teachers and librarians select and share reading material in classrooms and libraries.

Before diving it, it is worth noting these are all “red” states. It is a popular and unhelpful narrative to simply write off these laws because of where they are being enacted. In many of these states, there is significant disenfranchisement of voters in addition to laws which make voting harder than it needs to be; this ensures a certain political persuasion remains in power. These systemic barriers to voting are the same ones which need to be considered in arguments that the people who can’t get these books from libraries thanks to these laws can “just get them at the bookstore.” We are in the business of dismantling hurdles, not leaving them where they are.

Further, as we’ve seen through these censorship roundups over the past year+, it does not matter where or how book bans begin. They trickle through each and every state in varying degrees, and what you see here could become models for future legislation elsewhere. Finally, writing off certain states does not help in ending book bans. Everyone, regardless of political affiliation or state of residence, deserves the right to access books, reading material, and information they want to. Fighting fire with fire helps no one.

Note that this list is not comprehensive. I’ve pulled out some of the biggest laws in several states that are having an immediate impact and that will likely influence further legislation within and beyond their jurisdictions.

Book Ban Bills Currently Enacted Across the US

Florida

There is not a wrong time to read some great witchy YA books. That said, there is something particularly good about reading new witchy YA books as the seasons begin to shift toward shorter days and nights. Lighting a candle and cracking open the windows to dig into a story about people who have magic powers, who often have cute or terrifying familiars, and who want to change their worlds? Count me in. We’re lucky, too, in that YA continues to offer more and more witchy books that are representative of the world at large. These books are queerer and more colorful than they ever have been before.

Whether you’re new to witchy books or are looking to add some more great options to your TBR, let’s dive into some outstanding new books that have hit shelves this year. Don’t like especially scary books or want more sweet witch stories? Never fear. Those are well represented here, too.

Bonus: Tirzah highlighted a ton more YA witch books publishing this year, and I’ve not repeated any below. Twice the witchy goodness!

One of the things I love the most about Star Wars is that there are so many stories in the galaxy. There are so many characters, so many stories, and such a rich history available that the possibilities are endless (I’m of the opinion that you can never have too many SW books, shows, or movies). Which makes me wonder why some of the most obvious books/series haven’t been made into TV shows yet.

This list focuses on canon books, mainly to avoid confusion. I’d love a Mara Jade TV show, and I’ve heard the rumors about her in Mandalorian season 3 and the rumors about a possible Disney+ Heir to the Empire movie, but forgive me if I’m skeptical. That being said, I would watch the hell out of a TV series based on Legends. Yes, I’m being purposely vague and sweeping: I’d watch any and all of it.

I’m behind on my Star Wars book reading and even further behind on my Star Wars comics reading (so many books, not enough hours in the day, and throw in single parenting a 6-year-old, and you’ve got your answer as to why that is), but I’ve come up with a list of Star Wars books and series that deserve their own shows. It goes without saying that this is not an exhaustive list by any means, and it barely scratches the surface. Let’s take a look!

The world, to say the very least, has been very challenging lately. And that won’t be changed by a fast and/or easy fix at all. So, I’ve been making it a point to find joy wherever I can because, yay, serotonin boosts. One thing that has always brought me happiness is music and I often listen to it while working, writing, or just relaxing with a game. And I have quite the eclectic collection of mixes.

When I was recently listening to my Madonna mix, it struck me that romance novels would pair up quite nicely with some of her songs. Now, I know that this may take some convincing but if you’ll allow me to expand on this, I’m confident you’ll be pleasantly surprised with my thought process. Because, with it being too hot to go out and do much of anything, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this.

With the June release of her latest album Finally Enough Love, the release of a limited series based on A League of Their Own based off the movie that featured Madonna on the screen and soundtrack alike, and August 16th being her birthday, now seemed the perfect time for a list.

So, without further delay, I present for your consideration, Madonna songs and romance novels match-ups!

If you’re someone who, like me, is an Elder born in the 1900s, you probably remember the early days of self-publishing. For those of you who don’t, it was a dark time. People were throwing their LiveJournals into .epub format and calling it a memoir, there was little-to-no editing, and anyone who wanted to write a book could do so without any oversight or input from another person. I am the first to agree that publishing gatekeeping is awful. It prioritizes voices of people who already have a platform, and it has a tendency to royally screw people whose voices would bring a new perspective to the table. And yes, that was a royalties pun, thank you for noticing.

These days, the Wild West-style wilderness of self-publishing still exists, and rightfully so. But there is also a “middle” layer, made up of authors who have decided to strike out on their own but also produce a more finished product. Kindle Unlimited is an offering of Amazon. For $10/month, you can borrow up to 20 titles on a rotating basis. It’s effectively an ebook library with no wait lists that’s funded by — and only accessible to — users. There is a wide offering of titles and genres available, so since I’ve been devouring mysteries lately, I’ve collected some of the top-rated and best Kindle Unlimited mysteries available.

I might be landlocked in the middle of Iowa but that doesn’t mean I don’t need a good bookish beach towel. Why, just a few weeks ago I went to a family get-together at a state park with a body of water in it. And as my brother-in-law said at the time, that body of water had what “could loosely be described as a beach.” Guess what we all had? Beach towels!

Unfortunately, my beach towel was a blue and white striped bore of a beach towel. Which got me to thinking: Surely there are bookish beach towels out there? So before I head on my next international vacation to lovely Iceland and its geothermal baths, I’m going to have to grab myself and my partner a couple of bookish beach towels.

Luckily, my fellow Book Riot contributors have written great articles about how to further perfect my bookish beachy day. I can follow this quiz to find out what brilliant beach read I should read this summer. I can get tips on how to achieve the ideal beach reading day. And if I want to just slap my new beach towel down on my front porch, I can even read one of these books that will transport me to the beach.

In August, I become regretful about everything that I haven’t squeezed into my summer and probably won’t. Here is an incomplete list of books I have started and not finished: First Love by Gwendoline Riley, At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Palace Papers by Tina Brown, Sex in the Archives by Barry Reay, and—many times—Swann’s Way (the first few pages). I abandoned all these books at different points and for the usual reasons; I was busy, bored, or left my copy at the beach. It seems like they are no longer going to be my summer reading—maybe in September.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

This week, I returned to one of my favorite explorations of the strange geometries of syntax: “Way down the deserted street, I thought I saw a bus which, with luck, might get me out of this sentence which might go on forever, knotting phrase onto phrase with fire hydrants and parking meters, and still not take me to my language waiting, surely, around some corner.” In Curves to the Apple, Rosmarie Waldrop’s sentences accelerate and swerve, reconfiguring the modern discourse on embodiment and subjectivity; there’s a spectacular volta lying in wait in each of these prose poems. “I learned about communication by twisting my legs around yours,” she writes, “as, in spinning a thought, we twist fiber on fiber.”

June 10

I wake up to three missed calls and matching voice mails from a blocked number that turns out to be FedEx Express Heavyweight informing me that since I was not around to receive my thousand-pound skid, it’s on its way to JFK. The delivery in question is Issue Seven of The Drift, the magazine I cofounded and co-run, and it was supposed to arrive next Monday or Tuesday in time for our launch party Thursday at the Public Hotel. Evidently it’s early … and sleeping in was a potentially multithousand-dollar mistake.

Kicking myself for how late I stayed out last night—there was a party at Russian Samovar for Joshua Cohen, whose novel The Netanyahus won this year’s Pulitzer in fiction—I dial FedEx and shoot an email to our printer. I got through most of The Netanyahus in a single sitting last summer, before I’d met its author. It’s mostly a satire based on an anecdote told to Cohen by the late literary critic Harold Bloom, but it’s also pointedly presentist, a self-conscious parable for liberalism in the Trump years. Early on it draws a dichotomy between history and theology that I’ve been mulling over since I encountered it.

While I’m on hold with FedEx I receive an email asking me to write a culture diary for this website, and I decide to start right away—no cherry-picking. Not that what I’m doing now is particularly “cultural”: I’m telling the automated system I’d like to “speak to a representative … speak to a representative,” getting transferred to incorrect extensions, hanging up, and dialing the line again. I haven’t even gotten out of bed. 

In French the word merle means blackbird, a dark bird of the thrush family. A blackbird’s song marks its territory. The male has black feathers and a yellow beak. It is in the same genus as the meadowlark. Forty years after first meeting James Merrill at my teacher David Kalstone’s Chelsea apartment, I am sitting at his desk in Stonington, Connecticut, with his large Petit Larousse open before me. Searching for the meanings of our names in French, I am distracted by a blackbird perched on the windowsill, drinking a little dew and then swaying on a nearby branch. It speaks in polished, rudimentary tones with a slow tempo.

Merrill’s big desk is in a small room—in an apartment of small rooms—behind a hinged bookcase that creates a very private space. Still, I can hear a train whistle, a foghorn, halyard lines clinking against the masts of sloops anchored in the harbor, church chimes, and bits of conversation from villagers below on Water Street. These must be the sounds Merrill heard, too, while working. He was an early riser and liked to give the first hours of the day to his poems, which reflect, mirrorlike, so many of my own feelings. Mirrors are also a motif in his poems—mirrors that remember us across the years, reflecting our beauty and dissolution alike. It has taken me some days to sit at his desk.

In French, my name means collar, and I think immediately of the metaphysical poet George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” published in 1633, a poem in which the fervid speaker seeks more freedom in his life. It is a poem of strong feeling, almost like a rant. Like his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill loved Herbert’s poems and could quote them by heart. During my twenties and thirties, perhaps there was no living poet I admired more than Merrill, and I am drawn still to this American poet, who was said to be writing even while needing oxygen on the night before his death more than twenty-five years ago.

I met the novelist Anuradha Roy in Delhi in the mid-nineties, when she was an editor at Oxford University Press and I had just published my first book. Not long after that, she moved to a Himalayan town to set up Permanent Black, now India’s premier intellectual publisher, with her husband, Rukun Advani. She also began to write fiction. Her fifth novel, The Earthspinner, which was released in the United States this summer, is about the war on reason and on imagination in a world consumed by political fanaticism.

Though I don’t remember what was said in our first meeting, I can recall a certain hopefulness in the air—there was a lot of that about, among publishers and writers, in India in the nineties. Writing in English was ceasing to be the furtive and poorly paid endeavor it long had been. There were greater opportunities to publish; new literary periodicals and networks of promotion seemed to be creating the infrastructure for more vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of that decade, helped by the prominence of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy abroad, was that Indian writing in English was “arriving,” no less resoundingly than was India’s embrace of consumer capitalism at the end of history. One measure of this apparent progress was the respectful international attention such work elicited. Granta and The New Yorker devoted issues to Indian writing in 1997, the fiftieth year of India’s independence from British colonialism.

In 2022, there is something very forlorn about the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence. Murderous Hindu supremacists rule the country, and lynch mobs—physical and digital—police its cultural and intellectual life. Educated Indians spend much of their time and energy trying to emigrate. Literature remains, for a tiny minority, the means to cognition in the darkness, and literary festivals project, briefly, the illusion of a community. But every writer seems terribly alone with herself. The sense of a meaningful shared space and a common language, the possibility of a broad literary flourishing—many of those fragile shoots of the nineties have been trampled into the ground by the ferocious invaders of private as well as public spheres.

Over twenty-five years of radical transformations, Anuradha and I have kept intermittently in touch. While emailing in recent months, I began to wonder if other readers should be invited to reflect on the fate of writers in India today. What follows is a conversation that explores some of the historical uniqueness of this fate.

After hearing the horrifying news about the attack on Salman Rushdie earlier today, I turned to the first book of his I’d read—or rather, the book he read, on audiocassette, to my family on long car journeys.

“Just do one thing for me,” Haroun called to his father. “Just this one thing. Think of the happiest times you can remember. Think of the view of the Valley of Κ we saw when we came through the Tunnel of I. Think about your wedding day. Please.”

—Emily Stokes, editor

In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which collects these columns and others Lispector wrote throughout her career, will be published in English by New Directions this September. As Lispector’s son Paulo Gurgel Valente has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas, the second in a series.

October 26, 1968

Bravado

Z.M. felt life was slipping through her fingers. In her humility, she forgot that she herself was a source of life and creation. She went out very little, turned down any invitations. She wasn’t the kind of woman to notice when a man was interested in her unless he actually said so — ​then she would be surprised and welcome his interest.

July 24, 2022

I live in LA, but I’ve just flown in from New York after a month away, so I wake up early, too early, at 4 A.M., and read a book called Healing Back Pain. The author, John Sarno, is a doctor who argues that most back pain is psychological—the result of tension, which arises from repressed emotion. He makes his perspective sound like the most obvious thing in the world, and makes the common explanations, like sitting too much, sound completely idiotic. Most people have been taught to think of chronic back pain as arising out of an inciting incident and to think of the spine, especially the lower spine, as very fragile—even though, he explains, bodies are resilient and spines exceptionally strong. I want to believe him, because if I do believe him I’ll never feel back pain again, or if I do, I’ll have my delicate psychology to blame, as opposed to an innocent object like my chair. Sarno has a cult following; I google him, careful to read only the testimonials about how the book has changed people’s lives. Then I fall back to sleep.

I wake up again, at 7 A.M., make tea, and open all the mail I got while I was away—health insurance bill; traffic ticket; copies of Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu and A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis; the new Paris Review; and a couple of issues of the London Review of Books. I read a review of Either/Or by Elif Batuman, a book that made me very angry. I was nevertheless gripped by it, as I was by The Idiot, probably because both present a problem that I’m still working out and which I’ve encountered in many novels that I might otherwise be inclined to say I enjoyed. I always feel betrayed by characters with whom I begin to identify—not necessarily because my life or psychology is like theirs, but because I can understand the contours of their journeys and want to follow them through—who then, in brief and passing moments, reveal the limits of their worldview, ushering in black people or poor people or people who speak in halting English as props to signal the boundaries of their otherwise astounding capacities for empathy. I have no interest in reading about characters who are likeable, or about characters who are inclined to like people like me, but I have a hard time not seeing it as a failure of a book’s attention to detail when people are turned into metonyms for cultures and ideologies with which the novel is unwilling to engage; it feels almost like the opposite of virtue signaling: a brief and passing confession that the protagonist is (of course!) burdened by the ugliness of her social class. Almost every review I’ve read of Either/Or mentions Selin’s naive and enthusiastic embrace of great works of literature, which she reads as instruction manuals for how to construct a life; none mentions her stated difficulty in appreciating hip-hop, which she summarizes as an altogether alienating genre of music defined by a man “saying ‘Uh, uh’ in the background.” (“Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees proves, for Selin, to be the exception to the rule, because “the man, despite several false alarms, never did start rapping, and instead a girl sang an old song with beautiful harmonies.”) But I don’t know—obviously Either/Or wasn’t going to be entirely about Selin’s problematic relationship to hip-hop. That would be a horrible book.

Edits on my novel are due next week, so I’ve vowed to do nothing and see no one until I finish. I spend the rest of the morning line editing, and then do a YouTube exercise video that involves flailing my limbs around as if I were lifting and then dropping a series of heavy objects. The couple in the video tries to be motivational and in the process takes a very derogatory stance on exercise, emphasizing how difficult it is and how happy we’ll all be once it’s finally over. Every time they demonstrate something especially excruciating, they repeat that “there are thousands, maybe millions” of other people suffering alongside me, which seems like a gross overestimation of their audience.

The seventies and eighties were a high point in American dance, and consequently, dance on television. As video technologies advanced, one-off performances inaccessible to most could be seamlessly captured and broadcast to the masses. Like all art forms, dance at this time was also influenced aesthetically by this new medium, as cinematic techniques permeated the choreographic (and vice versa). Today, many of these dance films are archived on YouTube. My favorite is a recording of avant-garde choreographer Blondell Cummings’s Chicken Soup, a one-woman monologue in dance that aired in 1988 on a TV program called Alive from Off Center. The piece is set to a minimalist score Cummings composed with Brian Eno and Meredith Monk. Over the music, a soft feminine voice narrates: “Coming through the open-window kitchen, all summer they drank iced coffee. With milk in it.” Cummings repeats a series of gestures: sipping coffee, threading a needle, and rocking a child. She glances with an exaggerated tilt of the head at an imaginary companion and mouths small talk—what Glenn Phillips of the Getty Museum calls her signature “facial choreography.” Her movements are sharp and distinct, creating the illusion that she is under a strobe light, or caught on slowly projected 35 mm film. She sways back and forth like a metronome, keeping time with her gestures.

This particular performance placed Cummings in a detailed set evocative of a fifties household. But when she performed Chicken Soup onstage, accompanied solely by piano music, there was no set at all aside from a wooden chair. In this recording, for example, of a 1989 live performance at Jacob’s Pillow, her movements themselves seem endowed with greater importance, and the barrier between storyteller and audience feels gauze thin. Chicken Soup is an invitation inside, into a conversation that is both private and familiar. “They sat in their flower-print housedresses at the white enameled kitchen table,” the voiceover continues, “endlessly talking about childhood friends. Operations. And abortions.” The work premiered in 1973, the year the Supreme Court ruled on Roe vs. Wade, but Cummings’s kitchen could be any woman’s—anytime, anywhere.

—Elinor Hitt, reader

I first met Patrizia Cavalli in 2018, in her apartment near Campo de’ Fiori, where we drank tea with honey and talked from early afternoon until sunset. Every surface was covered with books, papers, notebooks, scissors, and scarves, and each bore the same handwritten note, a warning to visitors: “Do not move! If you move anything, I’ll kill you.” Over the course of two years, we had three more conversations, speaking for five hours at a stretch. The apartment had been her home for decades: in the late sixties, as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, she rented a single room there; she had just left Todi, the town in Umbria where she grew up, and in Rome she felt unmoored and lonely. In 1969, through a mutual friend, she met the writer Elsa Morante, who was then working on her novel History. Morante was the first person to look at Cavalli’s poems, and after reading them, she called to say, “Patrizia, I’m happy to tell you that you are a poet.”

More than fifty years later, Cavalli’s poems are translated and loved across Europe and the United States. Her first collection, My Poems Won’t Change the World (1974), signaled the forthrightness and disregard for authority that would characterize all her work. Cavalli examines the causes and conditions of pleasure and pain, and the moments in life, often imperceptible at the time, that herald change. Her work explores infatuation, boredom, deception, conflict, grief—all in a poetic voice whose nonchalance belies its artistry.

When Cavalli died in June, it felt as though all of Rome wanted to pay tribute. A beautiful ceremony took place at the Campidoglio, where flowers were piled upon flowers. Her admirers and friends crowded the stairwell, and the room where her body lay in state. Cavalli might have criticized the extravagant floral arrangements, but she would have been moved by the words her loved ones chose to speak—some of them her own.

June 5, 2001

When I wrote this, I was living full-time in an idyllic southwest German university town where I had been a familiar figure since the eighties, spending money saved up from fifteen years of menial work elsewhere while sharing a small apartment with two other women. My last job had involved documenting C++, so people were leaning on me to learn to code.

My diaries are rife with shorthand made up of proper names. People stand in for their lifestyles, values, and even for chance remarks. For example, the Christe doctrine refers to a principle casually formulated by the heavy metal critic Ian Christe circa 1994. He felt that people should move where they want to live and look for work there, instead of the other way around, because people always give the really plum jobs to their friends. At the time he was making a living beta-testing video games.

The words in this entry are also abbreviations. Settle means to abjure free love and live with a partner again, likely tripling my household income. Computers means a full-time tech job. Tü, of course, is Universitätsstadt Tübingen, the notoriously livable earthly paradise where I was working my way through a friend’s list of sexual recommendations. Having slept with basically every man she knew, she had informed opinions as to which ones I’d enjoy. During the day, I wrote letters and blog entries (e.g. https://shats.com/AR/Previous/NellNovember2000.htm#Bruno). I was having a good time. Did I really want to “settle?”

Today’s Featured Deals

In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Deals

Previous Daily Deals

One of the biggest Barnes & Noble sales of the year has started and is offering 50% off hundreds of books, board games, planners, and more. Among the books offered are fiction, nonfiction, new releases, audiobooks, YA, and kids’ books. Below are some of the most popular titles offered. The prices listed factor in the sale.

New Releases

Fiction

Nonfiction

Young Adult