We know that the same books show up again and again in these bans and challenges across the U.S. Beyond the copycat effect, what’s driving this push for specific titles to be pulled are book ratings systems created by groups like Moms For Liberty, Utah Parents United, and others. These book ratings systems are homegrown creations, developed my volunteers affiliated with these groups. The volunteers are ostensibly parents, though we know from a year and a half of increased book censorship that many are not. They have no formal training in child development, in literacy, or in determining text appropriateness. These volunteer book evaluators go in with their agenda and rate the books with them, absolutely undermining the professional judgment, training, knowledge, and experience of educators and librarians. In some cases, these book review systems are trickling into school boards. In other cases, these volunteers are using their experience in developing these databases as proof they’re capable of sitting on boards and on committees to evaluate the books in schools and libraries.

Without question, if school boards continue to be influenced by right-wing, Christian nationalists, these ratings systems will continue to infiltrate public education, devaluing the professional experience of school and library employees. (This is, of course, a step in the plan of destroying public education at large.)

Let’s take a look at several of the biggest databases out there, as well as who they are affiliated with. This is by no means comprehensive, but instead, a way to make sense of where these challenges are coming from and a way to see where book challengers are getting their copy-paste arguments.

All of these databases are accessible to the public, with the exception of one, which is very easy to gain access via Facebook. Though these are separate systems, many of these groups work together and collaborate, utilizing power in numbers.

None of these sites are linked for reasons that should be pretty obvious, but they are very easy to find.

Book bans in prisons are nothing new. In fact, censorship thrives in the prison system. Whether the prison is public or private and part of a state-wide system or independent impacts the materials allowed to be sent to individuals (and the method by which they can be sent) and the materials allowed in prison libraries (if those libraries exist at all).

Now, Florida prisons have banned a book by a writer who formerly experienced incarceration about her experience.

Keri Blakinger is a reporter for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news source covering all things relating to the criminal justice system. Corrections In Ink follows Blakinger’s experience growing up as a competitive ice skater who, when her skating partnership ended, began experimenting with drugs. Nine years of instability in her life involved time living houseless and struggling with substance abuse, and just when she was about to pull her life together, Blakinger was arrested. She spent two years in a state prison, leaving sober. Corrections in Ink not only tells her story but offers insight into how she used her privileges as a white woman to help others who were in positions not dissimilar to hers.

The Prison Book Program attempted to send her book to a person inside a Florida prison at Okaloosa, and it was impounded. It is up to the Florida Department of Corrections’ Literature Review Committee to determine whether or not the book can be inside the facilities, but in the mean time, it is banned from every Florida state prison.

Once upon a time, space was only something that humankind could gaze upon and dream about. People wrote outlandish stories about what might be up there, but for most of recorded human history, no one actually knew. Sure, they could see stars and moons and planets, but no one could visit. That all changed in the mid-20th century, when we started actually being launched into the sky. The people who went to space were named astronauts, and as little kids, many of us have lofty goals of being one, but few actually get to touch the stars. That’s why reading about astronauts is so fascinating, hence this list of 30 great astronaut books.

Below, you’ll find stories by and about people who have flown in shuttles, walked on the moon, and visited space stations, as well as a few stories of the people who helped get them there. We may have only explored a fraction of space, but every story about it is exciting and new! There are also several great novels of space exploration, and several fun kids’ books on astronauts, too! The observable, explorable universe is finite, but you’ll never run out of books about space. And with this handy list, you’ll be flying among the stars in no time!

There’s a chill in the air, color in the leaves, and we’re all breaking out our blankets and sweaters. If you’re here, you like snuggling up with a good book especially as the weather turns colder, and comic books are no exception. There’s no better time to grab a hefty omnibus than when I have the padding of a blanket on my lap. As Jack Frost starts his work, I can read about heroes and villains with fire abilities to warm me up.

Of course, there are hundreds of comic book issues that come out every month and November is no exception. Most of them are the newest issue of a long- or short-running series, which makes them very hard to jump into. Continuity is both one of the greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses of comics. This list focuses on #1 issues, collections, and graphic novels.

November has it all in the world of glossies. Superheroes old and new, vampires, Eisner Award nominees, spies, and science fiction. Each one is either standalone or a great point to jump into a new series. Check this list and call your local comic book shop because you need these new comics in November on your pull list.

As you mark your calendar for November events, remember to have your plan to vote in place and a nice stack of books to read, or admiringly stare at. Collecting unread books is also valid — you do you! For this month I’ve got a wide variety of moods and crime books. I’m doing my best to keep up with publishing dates changing so you may remember a book from a couple months ago that got moved for real (hopefully) to this month.

There’s a lot of great reading to be had this November in many different tones and sub-genres! There’s the start to a new police procedural set in Colorado; a dark academia mystery; a short story collection set in countries around the world; a cozy mystery; a story collection with the theme of “witness” with proceeds going to a good cause, a page-turning murder mystery with plenty of suspects; a vigilante historical fiction; a true crime murder that looks at the ethics of genealogy companies’ privacy rules; a past campus murder mystery; a woman who returns home to help her tribe being threatened by frackers; a new Inspector Gamache novel, and two new entries in fun series: one a psychic paired with a detective and the other a loosely tied mystery series for fans of the genre and its tropes.

When I first heard this question, my gut reaction was an emphatic “Yes!” So many self-help/self-improvement books, business books, even some financial advice books are full of unnecessary fluff.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People easily lends itself to a numbered list with a couple-sentence description for each. Atomic Habits is focused around four main steps. Sometimes there are graphs and charts. It could be a zine! I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time could fit in a fortune cookie: “Be a woman who makes six figures at least, has a flexible job, and outsources most domestic labor.” Easy peasy! I know I may be hurting some feelings with this next one, but Brené Brown is really squeezing every bit of juice out of that vulnerability lemon.

My friends: if you have not caught on after your first two Brené Brown books, then I think you might benefit by picking fruit from a different tree in a distant orchard.

All of the above answer the question of “Can most self-help books be pamphlets?” but it doesn’t really answer the question in the title which is “Should most self-help books be pamphlets?” and that, dear readers, is a different question entirely.

Before I answer this question, you should know that I’m an avid self-help reader and I am writing this from a place of fondness. In fact, many of us who read self-help can be described as “avid.” It seems so rare that a person ever picks up only one or two in the genre, likes it, then never touches it ever again. We are serial self-help readers, some of us constantly searching for someone else to tell us to get our shit together, clean up our home, set boundaries, take a nap, and unfuck literally anything in a 10-mile radius. Maybe we are looking for that one book, that singular, special thing that will finally make everything in our lives fall into place.

While every story in Meng Jin’s Self-Portrait with Ghost is eerie—as the collection’s title might suggest—the eeriest is the one about three babysitters. “Three women,” the narrator remembers, then corrects herself: “three girls,” though all older than she was. As a child she thought of them as the pretty one and the wicked one, both of whom she loved, and the boring one, whom she disdained. When she grew up and went to college, she found she couldn’t really see her own body except when she compared herself to other girls—whether “ugly or pretty, beautiful or gorgeous, if she was plain but sweet, if I wanted to look like her or not.” Boys, too, she evaluated by proxy: if his girlfriend was pretty, he was desirable. What she didn’t know was that, at the same stage of girlhood, her three original models were already vanishing into women—defined no longer by their own prettiness, wickedness, or dullness, but by the common objectification of their bodies, the varieties of violence done to them, and their differing abilities to stand it. 

—Jane Breakell, development director

I don’t scare easily, but the Latvian artist Julia Soboleva’s I have found the light in the darkness terrified me. In her monograph, which features paintings and collages made of old photographs, Soboleva conjures up an eerie underworld inhabited by birdlike creatures. In one image, a group of weeping doctors with bird heads gather around a surgical table and use pliers to operate on a bleeding human leg. In another, two creatures carry a dead body on a stretcher while a third one watches, smiling. But what’s most disturbing about the book is how, at times, these hybrid animals seem ordinary, even human. They give birth, dance in the park, make out, and meditate; they pose for pictures with their loved ones, and they seem happy. Soboleva’s rendering of this ghostly world in images is so clear that it’s as if these strange creatures have always lived right beneath our feet, and she is finally allowing us to see them.

I was almost done with a draft of my novel when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Amid the destruction and devastation that followed, continuing with my novel felt impossible; I turned toward journalism, which had always been a part-time job for me. For seven months, I have been working as a war correspondent in Ukraine. I have found that I can only read war reports: I am constantly turning to On the Front Line by Marie Colvin. I have wondered about the role of literature, especially in wartime: Are we simply supposed to let documentaries and daily news take over? Or do we find—and provide—an escape from the unbearable?

I began to ask other writers these questions and was surprised by the variability of their answers. Five Ukrainian writers from the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv regions—the areas devastated by the war—spoke to me about the genres they have been reading and writing during the war. In Kharkiv, a literature professor told me about his rare books being burned in the stove by the Russian military. He also told me about a Ukrainian officer seeking reading recommendations the day before being killed at the front. “I think that an epic work of literature will not come until after the war is over,” writes Serhiy Zhadan. On the other hand, says Lyuba Yakimchuk, “The task of poets is to put the unspeakable feelings in words.” Olga Kryaziach, whose apartment and books were also burned by the Russians, reads and writes on her iPad, taking notes for a different future.

Iya Kiva

I have started to become spatially disoriented because of the war. Once, as I was getting back to a rented apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I was or how I got there for hours. I lived in a Soviet project-style block of flats called khrushchyovka surrounded by identical buildings, and I couldn’t understand which one of those khrushchyovkaswas my home these days; I was shaking and I couldn’t breathe. In another one of my rented apartments, I was always hitting my head while entering. At home, I needed to turn left after entering, but in this new space I had to turn right.

Katherine Dunn didn’t really make a living from her fiction until 1987, when, at forty-two, she sold Geek Love, her third published novel, to Sonny Mehta at Knopf for twenty-five thousand dollars—a windfall that briefly swept away her persistent financial concerns. Dunn had relied on all sorts of ways to make ends meet while she was coming up as a writer. At eighteen years old, in 1963, she sold fake magazine subscriptions door-to-door in the Midwest until she was arrested in Missouri for trying to cash a client’s fraudulent check. As a college student, first at Portland State and later at Reed, she worked as a topless dancer, a nude model for art students, and a writer of fellow students’ term papers. She also hustled pool.

After her first novel, Attic, was published in 1970, Dunn got a gig in Manhattan writing scripts for Warner Brothers. She returned to Portland in 1976, after years of travel. There she tended bar at the Earth Tavern, a dive-bar-slash-rock venue frequented by hippies, bikers, and merchant marines. She wrote a question-and-answer column for Willamette Week, the local Portland alt-weekly, and covered local boxing.

But, mostly, as she struggled to make it as a fiction writer, Dunn waited tables, most notably at the Stepping Stone Cafe, a terrific Northwest Portland diner. When I stopped there last summer on a trip doing research for a biography about Dunn, it felt like it probably hadn’t changed much since she worked there in the seventies and eighties. Back then, the only day care she could afford for her young son, Eli Dapolonia, was a seat at the counter while she poured coffee and charmed customers.

18/04/2022, 14:28, CT Angiogram renal & abdominal

No vascular calcification.

No renal calculi.

The kidneys are symmetrical in size (right = 11.1 cm; left = 11.0 cm) and normal in morphology.

When I show up for New York Film Festival’s 9:30 P.M. opening-night screening of White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, the lobby is already swarming with television executives, publicists, and Lincoln Center benefactors. No one seems to have known how to dress for either the event or the weather. (Puffer coat and sheer tights? Sandals and spaghetti straps? Sensible backpack or Prada bag?) “They told me the vibe was black-tie,” a woman in a sequined gown says to her husband guiltily. He has very clearly been forced to wear a tuxedo. I watch some groups trying and failing to cut the line by flashing the branded wristband we have all been given. I find my seat and settle in for a Q&A with Noah Baumbach and members of the cast, including Greta Gerwig, Adam Driver, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Don Cheadle. They crack self-deprecating off-the-cuff jokes, as if there had not been two previous screenings earlier this evening. (At one point Baumbach says the “nine o’clock crowd” is his favorite yet. People cheer.) 

Finally the movie starts, and I take in Adam Driver as Jack Gladney, the chairman of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, complete with gaudy button-down, receding hairline, and prosthetic paunch. The film is divided into three sections punctuated by the climactic “airborne toxic event,” which, as in the book, is also the most exciting and easiest bit to follow (a car crashes into a train carrying noxious chemicals; deadly smoke shrouds the sky). As the movie’s abrupt cuts and ecstatic colors make me mildly seasick, I notice some cast members appearing and disappearing into an opera box to glance at themselves on the screen. Perhaps taking their cue from the cast, several audience members trickle toward the exits around the time Babette, played by Gerwig, tells Jack she is afraid to die. (They miss the best part of the movie, which is the extended credits-and-dance sequence in the supermarket, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “new body rhumba,” written for the film.) The lights come back on and the actors again appear in the opera box, applauding and waving to the crowd.

A little after midnight, a group of white-haired men in newsboy caps wander down 66th Street toward Central Park, in the general direction of the after-party. “That Adam Driver,” one of them says. “Poorly cast. He just isn’t what you’d call an everyman.” A few women walk beside me, discussing the odds of getting in without a wristband. “What if Noah Baumbach tells us to leave?” A long line leaks out of Tavern on the Green: women in pearls and staticky shawls, men in sport coats over T-shirts and loafers without socks. Someone ushers me toward the front and soon enough I’m holding a miniature cheeseburger, a tiny tiramisu, and a free negroni. A famous DJ plays and red strobe lights flash across walls lined with rows of Campari bottles. I watch a group of women attempt to order spicy margaritas from the bartender, who throws his hands up in exasperation—he can’t serve anything except Campari-based cocktails. The liquor brand is proudly sponsoring the event. 

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

Before this September, I hadn’t heard from Yara in months. They’re an Iranian journalist who has reported for the country’s most prominent newspapers and publications. We first met in New York in 2018 and bonded over the difficulties that come with reporting on Iran: they were rightly afraid of being arrested for their work, and I’ve been afraid that I will no longer be able to return to the country where I was born due to writing about it from abroad. As the Islamic Republic began to escalate the crackdowns on journalists, activists, and civil society, Yara—a pseudonym I’m using to protect their identity—was forced to leave Iran. But when their father was diagnosed with cancer, they had to return. They messaged me to say they were going back and let me know I likely wouldn’t hear from them. If the authorities knew that Yara was communicating with me, an Iranian dual national who works for the New York Times, they could accuse them of conspiracy, spying, and a whole host of other nonsensical charges. I worried about Yara, but I knew their silence meant they were safe. 

In September, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini died after being detained in Tehran by the so-called Morality Police for breaking the “hijab rule.” On Twitter, a photographer named Niloofar Hamedi posted a photo of Amini unconscious in a hospital bed, with tubes coming out of her mouth, a swollen face, and dried blood on her ears. Her image enraged Iranians and sparked mass demonstrations. The protests are now in their fifth week and have spread to more than eighty cities and towns. It’s both the largest and most widespread uprising that the Islamic Republic has seen in its forty-three-year history. Many of us, familiar with the state’s history of lethal crackdowns, were waiting nervously for them to begin. Arrests have already started, as have periodic internet shutoffs. Hamedi is now in solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.   

On September 26, during the third week of the protests, I finally heard from Yara. They had just been arrested and interrogated at the Ministry of Intelligence. “They will take me to jail for about two years due to my reports,” Yara wrote. “But I am not scared, something like hope is rising among us, hope for changes, for women, life, freedom, for visiting you in Tehran soon.” They said it may be a month or two until they have a court date and are sent to prison. In the meantime, they wanted to collaborate on another story. They sent me their notes and wrote, “Keep our fingers crossed that the internet will work tomorrow.” 

I first read Nancy Lemann’s novel Lives of the Saints in one sitting, on an airplane. I was spellbound, moved, and deeply charmed. Who was this woman? Why had I never read her before? How was she capable of articulating an experience of youth that, in all its wastrelness, was exactly like my own despite being completely different?

Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985, is a novel that undermines our expectations of narrative: Lemann’s fiction does not flow in the normal direction but loops in circles and rides along on digressions that resemble the chaos of real life. The book is remarkable for its restraint and for its lush detail. If it can be said to be “about” anything, it’s about a young woman named Louise who has returned to New Orleans from college in the North; she finds herself thrust back into the richly entangled social world of her childhood, back among the people she has always known, including Claude Collier, the only man who can break her heart “into a million pieces on the floor.” Lives of the Saints is peopled by eccentrics and doomed lovers and drunks and people who are always “Having a Breakdown.” It’s so rollickingly funny that in retrospect you might forget about its central tragedy, then reread it and get your heart broken all over again.

Like Cassandra at the Wedding and The Transit of Venus, Lives of the Saints has had a formidable afterlife, sustained not by support from the literary publicity machine but by a network of recommendations from die-hard fans, of which I am now one. (I don’t remember how or when I picked up my copy, but much of the current generation of fandom can be traced to Kaitlin Phillips’s 2018 recommendation in SSENSE: “Read this book in the bath.”) After finishing it, I ordered every single one of Lemann’s novels, and read them more or less back-to-back. It felt like absorbing a consciousness that suddenly made everything make sense. I, too, have Had a Breakdown. I, too, romanticize the impossible, the decaying, and the societies that have lapsed in a long slow deserved decline; I can be moved to tears by things like wisteria and particular angles of winter sunlight. One of her narrators even romanticizes the fall of the Ottoman Empire! 

Lemann’s story “Diary of Remorse,” in our Fall issue, has the same madcap, digressive quality that defines her novels as well as the same blend of humor, pain, and beauty. You can read a chat the two of us had on the phone in September below. We agreed, among other things, that youth is angst.

In 1994, the internationally acclaimed fiction writer Lucia Berlin met the New York School poet and librettist Kenward Elmslie at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, where they were both visiting writers. “We just clicked,” Berlin said in a 2002 interview. “We cut through right away into each other’s deep feelings. It was like falling in love, or going back to your childhood best friend in first grade, that kind of really pure friendship.”

That friendship developed through a faithful and frequent correspondence, a literary exchange of about two letters per week over the course of a decade. Lucia was living in Boulder, Colorado, and later in Los Angeles; Kenward was dividing his time between New York City and Calais, Vermont. Despite the distance between them, the two writers came to depend on their intimate friendship and deeply valued their correspondence.

In the following letters dated between May 28 and August 5, 2000, Lucia and Kenward discuss a New York production of Kenward’s musical play, Postcards on Parade, and the books each was working on at the time: Lucia’s memoir, Welcome Home, and Kenward’s fourteenth poetry collection, Blast from the Past, which he wanted to dedicate to Lucia. They write about the books they’re reading, Lucia’s recent move to a trailer park, and the thrilling poetic visuals she sees from her windows.

It was only a matter of time before the “Don’t Say Gay” bill of Florida and the wave of similar anti-LGBTQ+ bills passed throughout the country made its way to the federal level.

Congressman Mike Johnson (Louisiana) introduced the “Stop the Sexualization of Children” Act into the House this week. The bill would “prohibit the use of Federal funds to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10, and for other purposes.” The bill would disallow funding for any organization — from libraries to schools to medical facilities and more — offering any materials or programming related to “sexually oriented material” to people under the age of 10. The vagueness of this definition is precisely the point, as it would open the door for vast interpretation and would not only lead to censorship but would lead to the persecution of any individual who does not align with perceived notions of “appropriate.”

As writer Alejandra Cabarello points out, the provision within the bill for “Private Right of Action” is an open bounty for individuals to file lawsuits against anyone using federal funds, banning any and all discussion of LGBTQ+ people and topics wherein there might be children under 10.

This means a queer elementary school educator may be unable to do their job, simply because they are queer. Or because they show a film that one parent may disagree with and choose to interpret as sexual indoctrination.

It means a queer doctor in a public hospital could be sued simply for being queer. A logo that looks too suspiciously “like a rainbow flag” could trigger lawsuits.