what are books banned for

The 15 most banned books in America this school year

Actor, author and ‘Reading Rainbow’ founder Levar Burton joins the L.A. Times Book Club to discuss the State of Banned Books.

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The recent surge in book bans in U.S. school districts and libraries is the latest front in a long-running battle that has swept up even literary masterpieces of John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger and Toni Morrison.

But the dramatically increasing censorship attempts have evolved, says Allison Lee, Los Angeles director of PEN America , a century-old writers organization that works to defend freedom of expression.

Prior to the current wave, communities usually banned books on a case-by-case basis, often in response to complaints about violent or sexual content. Now, Lee says, “large swaths of books, sometimes even entire school or classroom libraries are being removed.” Many activists and politicians object to an entire genre of books that deal with LGBTQ+ topics or issues. Other targeted books deal with race.

The American Library Assn. reports that in 2022 a record 1,269 demands were made to restrict or ban books and other materials in schools and libraries — up from 156 demands in 2020.

Here are 15 books PEN America says were most frequently banned from July 2021 through the first part of the 2022-23 school year.

1. “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe. This bestselling 2019 autobiography in graphic novel format has been praised for its honest, open discussion of what it’s like to be a nonbinary person. It also has been attacked for its frank depiction of sexual behavior, as Times columnist Robin Abcarian wrote in 2022 . The debut book by a Santa Rosa illustrator, “ Gender Queer ” has become the most banned book in America, a target of school boards, conservative candidates, preachers and parental groups who condemned it as pornography aimed at impressionable children. (56 bans; 150 challenges, according to the ALA )

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2. “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson . In a recent discussion at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books , Johnson recalled that as a young Black queer person, they never saw themselves in any of the books they read. That led Johnson to write this 2020 book of coming-of-age essays, which has been challenged for its LGBTQ+ content and for being sexually explicit. In 2022, Time magazine named Johnson one of the 100 influencers shaping the next generation. (38 bans, 86 challenges)

3. “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison. First published in 1970, Morrison’s novel about a Black girl growing up during the Great Depression is a meditation on the oppressive nature of America’s white-centric conception of beauty, as New York Times reviewer John Leonard wrote at the time. The story’s depiction of child abuse and sexual violence led to it being banned at a Southern California high school and elsewhere. (32 bans, 73 challenges)

4. “Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Perez. A 1937 explosion that killed nearly 300 students and teachers at a Texas school provides the historical context for this YA novel , a love story about a Black boy and a Mexican American girl. Published in 2015, the book written by an Ohio State University literature professor faced challenges in 2021 about sexual depictions in the story. (31 bans, 50 challenges)

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5. “Flamer” b y Mike Curato. This award-winning 2020 novel explores a teenage boy’s struggle to understand and accept his sexuality while at summer camp in the 1990s. In an interview with PEN America, Curato described “ Flamer ” as a book about suicide prevention. Critics objected to its sexual-leaning content. (25 bans, 62 challenges)

6. “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas . Published in 2017, this novel about a teenage girl who witnesses a police officer kill her childhood best friend was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. The bestseller was adapted into a 2018 film by the same name. An Illinois school board cited inappropriate language as a reason to ban the book in 2022 ; other challenges cited violence and an anti-police message. At the Festival of Books in April, Thomas said books like hers are seen as dangerous because of the power they have to create change through empathy. (24 bans)

7. “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins. The author based her 2004 novel on her daughter’s struggle with addiction to crystal meth and says the experience helped her better understand the nature of addiction. “The power of this novel is still felt in the constant challenges it still faces nearly twenty years after it was originally published,” writes Maryland librarian Nia Thimakis for the ALA . Challenges cited the book’s depictions of drug use and a violent sexual encounter. (24 bans, 48 challenges)

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8. “Lawn Boy” b y Jonathan Evison. The 2018 novel tells the story of Mike Muñoz, a young biracial gay Chicano from a working-class family in Washington state. “The coming of age novel has received top marks from critics and readers, but also some challenges as well in schools and libraries because it contains profanity and sexually explicit scenes,” according to the ALA . (23 bans, 54 challenges)

9. “Tricks” by Ellen Hopkins . In this 2009 novel , Hopkins tells the story of five troubled teenagers who become involved in prostitution in different parts of the country. It’s another provocative work by Hopkins , who had four books on the ALA’’s list of the top 100 banned or challenged books between 2010 and 2019. (21 bans)

10. “This Book I s Gay” by Juno Dawson. The British author delves into sexuality and gender in her 2014 young adult nonfiction bestseller . “I felt as a former teacher, sex education for LGBTQ+ teenagers wasn’t very good,” Dawson says on Instagram. “They weren’t really learning anything about safety in relationships.” Critics have denounced the book on social media as pornography. (21 bans, 48 challenges)

11. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie . Based on his own experiences, Alexie tells the story of a budding cartoonist growing up on a Spokane, Wash., reservation. Detractors have challenged the 2007 bestseller, citing sexual references and profanity. (21 bans, 52 challenges)

12. “Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher . This 2007 novel explores the reasons a teenage girl decided to take her own life, recorded on cassette tapes discovered by a friend. The book was adapted into a Netflix series in 2017. One Colorado school district banned the book, saying it glamorized suicide, according to PBS NewsHour . (20 bans)

13. “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” by Jesse Andrews . This 2012 novel centers around two teenage boys who try to make a movie about their female friend with leukemia. One Missouri school district pulled it from libraries in 2023 because of explicit sexual language. (20 bans, 48 challenges)

14. “Sold” by Patricia McCormick. This 2006 novel, about a young Nepalese girl who struggles to survive being sold into sexual slavery, was a National Book Award finalist . But its realistic depiction of her plight has led to challenges . (18 bans)

15. “Melissa” by Alex Gino . Published in 2015, the novel follows the story of trans fourth-grader Melissa , who is seen by everyone as a boy named George. The book received the ALA’s Stonewall Book Award, a Lambda Literary Award and a Children’s Choice book award. In 2020, opponents of the book tried to close a town library in Kansas because it was on the shelf. (18 bans)

Classic works under fire

Here are another 10 notable books that have been banned or challenged over the years, according to the ALA and other sources.

“The Storyteller” by Jodi Picoult. This 2013 novel, about a young woman who discovers that an elderly man in her town was a death camp commander during the Holocaust, was among 20 books by the bestselling author removed in March from school libraries in Martin County, Fla., according to PEN America . Also removed were nine books from James Patterson’s “Maximum Ride” series and two books by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, among other titles.

“Forever” by Judy Blume. This 1975 novel, about a teenage couple who begin having sex, also was banned by Martin County’s school system. “What country is this?” Blume complained to NPR.

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“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. This 1951 novel is a classic of post-World War II American literature. The ALA notes that this title has been a favorite target of censors since its publication. Numerous school districts removed it from libraries and reading lists between 1960 and 2000.

“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck . The Nobel Prize-winning author’s novel about the Dust Bowl and the hard lives of displaced farmers and their families in California became a bestseller in 1939. It was banned and copies were burned in Kern County, the destination of the fictional Joad family.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. The classic 1960 novel about racial injustice in a Southern town has been banned and challenged in numerous communities. Challenges often cite language and racial depictions. The hit Broadway adaptation by Aaron Sorkin has been a lightning rod for controversy.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell. The 1949 dystopian novel was challenged in Florida in 1981 for being “pro-communist” and sexually explicit.

“Beloved” by Toni Morrison. The 1987 novel, in which an enslaved Black woman kills her young daughter to spare her from slavery, was pulled from the Advanced Placement English class at a Louisville, Ky., high school in 2007 after parents complained. The principal ordered teachers to start over with “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller . The 1961 antiwar novel was banned by a school district in Strongville, Ohio, in 1972, along with two novels by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. After students filed a lawsuit, a federal appeals court restored access , deciding the students had “the right to receive information which they and their teachers desired to have. ”

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. Modern Library’s editorial board ranked “Brave New World,” the 1932 novel about the discontents of a technologically-advanced future society, as the fifth most important novel of the 20th century . Nevertheless, the book was challenged as required reading in the Corona-Norco Unified School District in 1993 because it is “centered around negative activity.” The novel also was removed from a high school library in Foley, Ala., in 2000 after a parent complained that it showed contempt for religion, marriage and family.

“Animal Farm” by George Orwell. The 1945 allegorical novella has been a target of complaints for decades, according to the ALA. In 1987, “ Animal Farm ” was one of dozens of books banned in schools in Bay County, Fla. Then 44 parents, students and teachers filed a federal lawsuit, and the school board reversed the decision. ‘’The only thing we have succeeded in doing is making sure every child in Bay County reads the books we banned,’’ a board member told the Associated Press.

Book club: State of Banned Books

What: Actor, author and “Reading Rainbow” founder LeVar Burton joined the L.A. Times Book Club on May 24 to discuss the State of Banned Books with Times editor Steve Padilla .

Where: ASU California Center in Los Angeles. This book club event also is available virtually: Watch now .

Join us: Sign up for the Book Club newsletter for latest books, news and events.

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Here Is Every Book Banned in America

Through the courageous work of PEN America, here is a scrollable, shoppable list of every book currently banned in the United States

Every product on this page was chosen by a Harper's BAZAAR editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

Reproduced here, the PEN list covers books that were banned or challenged during the first half of the 2022 school year—the most recent data available. Some of these titles have since been reinstated; others have disappeared from shelves altogether.

As many people have noted, the past school year has seen an uptick in banning works by and about Black people and queer people specifically. Fences , a classic of African-American theater, is on this list, as are Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail and children’s picture books about Black joy. Some states have chosen to ban any written materials relating to visual art—Missouri’s list includes guides to Impressionist and modern painters as well as Babylonian and African art.

Whichever artistic tradition is targeted, students—and our future culture—suffer.

You can see the full list of banned titles below, or click on your state to see which books are banned. You can also purchase nearly every title here, through Bookshop.org and Better World Books .

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Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out , Susan Kuklin

Felix Ever After , Kacen Callender

This Book Is Gay , Juno Dawson

Flamer , Mike Curato

Gender Queer: A Memoir , Maia Kobabe

Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human (A Graphic Novel) , Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan

10,000 Dresses , Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray

A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl , Tanya Lee Stone

A Court of Mist and Fury , Sarah J. Maas

A ​Court of Silver Flames , Sarah J. Maas

A Court of Thorns and Roses , Sarah J. Maas

A Court of Wings and Ruin , Sarah J. Maas

A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo , Jill Twiss and E.G. Keller

Ace of Spades , Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto , George M. Johnson

All the Bright Places , Jennifer Niven

All the Things We Do in the Dark , Saundra Mitchell

Allegedly , Tiffany D. Jackson

Almost Perfect , Brian Katcher

Alt Ed , Catherine Atkins

Ana on the Edge , A.J. Sass

And Tango Makes Three , Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell, and Henry Cole

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging , Louise Rennison

Antiracist Baby , Ibram X. Kendi and Ashley Lukashevsky

Ask the Passengers , A.S. King

Autoboyography , Christina Lauren

Beartown , Fredrik Backman

Beautiful , Amy Reed

Being Jazz: My Life As a (Transgender) Teen , Jazz Jennings

Beloved , Toni Morrison

Better Nate Than Ever , Tim Federle

Big Bob, Little Bob , James Howe and Laura Ellen Anderson

Black Brother, Black Brother , Jewell Parker Rhodes

Black Girl Unlimited: The Remarkable Story of a Teenage Wizard , Echo Brown

Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope , Jodie Patterson and Charnelle Pinkney Barlow

Both Can Be True , Jules Machias

Boy Girl Boy , Ron Koertge

Boy2Girl , Terence Blacker

Boy Toy , Barry Lyga

Breathless , Jennifer Niven

Bumped , Megan McCafferty

Burned , Ellen Hopkins

Call Me Max , Kyle Lukoff and Luciano Lozano

Calvin , J.R. and Vanessa Ford, and Kayla Harren

Chosen , P.C. Cast and Kristen Cast

City of Thieves , David Benioff

Clockwork Princess , Cassandra Clare

Collateral , Ellen Hopkins

Crank , Ellen Hopkins

Damsel , Elana K. Arnold

Darius the Great Deserves Better , Adib Khorram

Date Rape (At Issue) , Christine Watkins

Dead Until Dark , Charlaine Harris

Dear Martin , Nic Stone

Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda , J.P. Stassen

Different Kinds of Fruit , Kyle Lukoff

Dime , E.R. Frank

Doing It! Let’s Talk About Sex , Hannah Witton

Drama: A Graphic Novel , Raina Telgemeier

Draw Me a Star , Eric Carle

Eleanor & Park , Rainbow Rowell

Embrace , Jessica Shirvington

Empire of Storms , Sarah J. Maas

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , Jonathan Safran Foer

Fable , Adrienne Young

Fade , Lisa McMann

Fallout , Ellen Hopkins

Fangirl , Rainbow Rowell

Finding Cinderella , Colleen Hoover

Flowers in the Attic , V.C. Andrews

Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything , E. Lockhart

Forever...  Judy Blume

Foul Is Fair , Hannah Capin

Frankie & Bug , Gayle Forman

Fred Gets Dressed , Peter Brown

From Blood and Ash , Jennifer L. Armentrout

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic , Alison Bechdel

Gabi, a Girl in Pieces , Isabel Quintero

Girl in Pieces , Kathleen Glasgow

Glass , Ellen Hopkins

GLBTQ*: The Survival Guide for Queer & Questioning Teens , Kelly Huegel

Go Ask Alice , Beatrice Sparks

Gracefully Grayson , Ami Polonsky

Graceling , Kristin Cashore

Grit , Gillian French

Ground Zero , Alan Gratz

Grown , Tiffany D. Jackson

Guyaholic , Carolyn Mackler

Half of a Yellow Sun , Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hear These Voices: Youth at the Edge of the Millennium , Anthony Allison

Heroine , Mindy McGinnis

Homegoing , Yaa Gyasi

House of Earth and Blood , Sarah J. Maas

I Am Jazz , Jessica Herthel, Jazz Jennings, and Shelagh McNicholas

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter , Erika L. Sánchez

I Never , Laura Hopper

Identical , Ellen Hopkins

I’ll Give You the Sun , Jandy Nelson

Impulse , Ellen Hopkins

In Our Mothers’ House , Patricia Polacco

Infandous , Elana K. Arnold

It Ends With Us , Colleen Hoover

It Feels Good To Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity , Theresa Thorn and Noah Grigni

It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health , Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley

Jacob’s New Dress , Sarah and Ian Hoffman

Jesus Land: A Memoir , Julia Scheeres

Julián Is a Mermaid , Jessica Love

Juliet Takes a Breath , Gabby Rivera

Killing Mr. Griffin , Lois Duncan

Kingdom of Ash , Sarah J. Maas

Kingdom of Flesh and Fire , Jennifer L. Armentrout

l8r, g8r , Lauren Myracle

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me , Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell

Lawn Boy , Jonathan Evison

Leah on the Offbeat , Becky Albertalli

Lessons From a Dead Girl , Jo Knowles

Letter From Birmingham Jail , Martin Luther King Jr.

Lexicon , Max Barry

Light It Up , Kekla Magoon

Lily and Dunkin , Donna Gephart

Little & Lion , Brandy Colbert

Looking for Alaska , John Green

Love Lies Beneath , Ellen Hopkins

Lucky , Alice Sebold

Lush , Natasha Friend

Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl?  Louis Sachar

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl , Jesse Andrews

Melissa (previously published as George ) , Alex Gino

Milk and Honey , Rupi Kaur

Mixed: A Colorful Story , Arree Chung

Monday’s Not Coming , Tiffany D. Jackson

More Happy Than Not , Adam Silvera

Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress , Christine Baldacchino and Isabelle Malenfant

My Friend Dahmer , Derf Backderf

My Jim , Nancy Rawles

My Princess Boy , Cheryl Kilodavis and Suzanne DeSimone

My Rainbow , Trinity and DeShanna Neal, and Art Twink

Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe , Preston Norton

Never Let Me Go , Kazuo Ishiguro

New Kid , Jerry Craft

Nineteen Minutes , Jodi Picoult

Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture , edited by Roxane Gay

Novels for Students, Vol. 9: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels , edited by Deborah A. Stanley and Ira Mark Milne

Oryx and Crake , Margaret Atwood

Out of Darkness , Ashley Hope Pérez

Perfect , Ellen Hopkins

Pet , Akwaeke Emezi

Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag , Rob Sanders and Steven Salerno

Protesting Police Violence in Modern America , Duchess Harris

Push , Sapphire

Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World , Sarah Prager

Race and Policing in Modern America , Duchess Harris

Rainbow Boys , Alex Sanchez

Ramona Blue , Julie Murphy

Ready or Not , Meg Cabot

Real Live Boyfriends: Yes. Boyfriends, Plural. If My Life Weren’t Complicated, I Wouldn’t Be Ruby Oliver , E. Lockhart

Red Hood , Elana K. Arnold

Red, White & Royal Blue , Casey McQuiston

Red: A Crayon’s Story , Michael Hall

Rick , Alex Gino

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry , Mildred D. Taylor

Rumble , Ellen Hopkins

Scars , Cheryl Rainfield

Shine , Lauren Myracle 

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda , Becky Albertalli

Slaughterhouse-Five , Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Sloppy Firsts , Megan McCafferty

Smoke , Ellen Hopkins

Sold , Patricia McCormick

Someday , David Levithan

Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place , Jackson Bird

Speak , Laurie Halse Anderson

Stained , Jennifer Richard Jacobson

Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America , Ibram X. Kendi

Stella Brings the Family , Miriam B. Schiffer and Holly Clifton-Brown

The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives , Dashka Slater

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story , Nikole Hannah-Jones

The 1619 Project: Born on the Water , Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renée Watson, and Nikkolas Smith

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , Sherman Alexie

The Art of Racing in the Rain , Garth Stein

The Black Flamingo , Dean Atta

The Bluest Eye , Toni Morrison

The Breakaways , Cathy G. Johnson

The Carnival at Bray , Jessie Ann Foley

The DUFF: Designated Ugly Fat Friend , Kody Keplinger

The Female of the Species , Mindy McGinnis

The Fire Next Time , James Baldwin

The Freedom Writers Diary , the Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell

The Glass Castle , Jeannette Walls

The God of Small Things , Arundhati Roy

The Handmaid’s Tale , Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel , Margaret Atwood and Renee Nault

The Hate U Give , Angie Thomas

The Haters , Jesse Andrews

The House of the Spirits , Isabel Allende

The House on Mango Street , Sandra Cisneros

The Infinite Moment of Us , Lauren Myracle

The Kingdom of Little Wounds , Susann Cokal

The Kite Runner , Khaled Hosseini

The Midnight Lie , Marie Rutkoski

The Music of What Happens , Bill Konigsberg

The Nowhere Girls , Amy Reed

The Pants Project , Cat Clarke

The Perks of Being a Wallflower , Stephen Chbosky

The Poet X , Elizabeth Acevedo

The Prince and the Dressmaker , Jen Wang

The Talk: Conversations About Race, Love & Truth , Wade Hudson and Cheryl Willis Hudson

The Truth About Alice: A Novel , Jennifer Mathieu

The Upside of Unrequited , Becky Albertalli

The Year of the Flood , Margaret Atwood

The You I’ve Never Known , Ellen Hopkins

Thirteen Reasons Why , Jay Asher

This Day in June , Gayle E. Pitman and Kristyna Litten

This One Summer , Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

Tilt , Ellen Hopkins

To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee

Too Bright to See , Kyle Lukoff

Tower of Dawn , Sarah J. Maas

Traffick , Ellen Hopkins

Triangles , Ellen Hopkins

Tricks , Ellen Hopkins

ttyl , Lauren Myracle

Twisted , Laurie Halse Anderson

Two Boys Kissing , David Levithan

Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Boy , Emmanuel Acho

Unravel Me , Tahereh Mafi

Water for Elephants , Sara Gruen

Wayward Son , Rainbow Rowell

We Are Not Your Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide , Carol Anderson and Tonya Bolden

We Are the Ants , Shaun David Hutchinson

What Girls Are Made Of , Elana K. Arnold

When Aidan Became a Brother , Kyle Lukoff and Kaylani Juanita

When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball , Mark Weakland and Daniel Duncan

Where I End and You Begin , Preston Norton

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West , Gregory Maguire

Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice , Mahogany L. Browne, Elizabeth Acevedo, Olivia Gatwood, and Theodore Taylor

Yolk , Mary H.K. Choi

Daughter of Smoke & Bone , Laini Taylor

Days of Blood & Starlight , Laini Taylor

Dreams of Gods & Monsters , Laini Taylor

Massachusetts

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe , Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Birthday , Meredith Russo

Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook: Somatic Skills to Help You Feel Safe in Your Body, Create Boundaries, and Live With Resilience , Erika Shershun

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America , Ijeoma Oluo

The Lovely Bones , Alice Sebold

We Are Okay , Nina LaCour

1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die: The Ultimate Guide to Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Manga , edited by Paul Gravatt

1984: The Graphic Novel , George Orwell and Fido Nesti

50 Artists You Should Know , Thomas Köster and Lars Röper

50 Paintings You Should Know , Kristina Lowis and Tamsin Pickeral

5 0 Sculptures You Should Know , Isabel Kühl and Klaus Reichold

50 Women Artists You Should Know , Christiane Weidemann

A Brief History of Manga , Helen McCarthy

A Game of Thrones: The Graphic Novel , George R.R. Martin, Daniel Abraham, and Tommy Patterson

A Gift for a Ghost , Borja González

A History of Art , Laura Perdew

A Map to the Sun , Sloane Leong

A Story About Cancer With a Happy Ending , India Desjardins and Marianne Ferrer

African Art: An Introduction , Frank Willett

Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics , Alan Moore

All-Action Classics No. 3: The Odyssey , Homer

Altered Carbon: One Life, One Death , Richard K. Morgan, Scott Bryan Wilson, and Max Fuchs

American Gods, Vol. 1: Shadows , Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, Colleen Doran, Walt Simonson, and Scott Hampton

American Gods, Vol. 2: My Ainsel , Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, Scott Hampton, Glenn Fabry, and Mark Buckingham

An Introduction to Drawing: An Artist’s Guide to Skills & Techniques , Robin Hazlewood

An Introduction to Oil Painting , Ray Smith

An Introduction to Watercolor , Ray Smith

André Kertész , Sarah Greenough, Robert Gurbo, and Sarah Kennel

Animal Stories , Peter and Maria Hoey

Annie Leibovitz at Work , Annie Leibovitz

Art: A World History , Elke Linda Buchholz, Susanne Kaeppele, Karoline Hille, Irina Stotland, and Gerhard Buhler

Art: Annotated Guides , Robert Cumming

Art That Changed the World , Ian Chilvers

Assassination Classroom , Yūsei Matsui 

Babylonian Mythology , Don Nardo

Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again , Frank Miller

Batman: The Killing Joke , Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

Batman: White Knight , Sean Murphy

Be Gay, Do Comics: Queer History, Memoir, and Satire , the Nib

Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites , Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson

Bingo Love #1 , Tee Franklin, Jenn St Onge, and Joy San

Black Butler, Vol. 29 , Yana Toboso

Black Hammer Volume 1: Secret Origins , Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston

Black Hammer Volume 2: The Event , Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston

Black Magick: Awakening , Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott

Black Road: The Holy North , Brian Wood and Garry Brown

Blackbird, Book 1: The Great Beast , Sam Humphries

Blade of the Immortal Omnibus, Vol. 3 , Hiroaki Samura

Blankets , Craig Thompson

Bleach, Vol. 21 , Tite Kubo

Bloodlust & Bonnets , Emily McGovern

Blues: A History of American Music , Christopher Handyside

Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy , Kelly Jensen

Bone Parish, Vol. 1 , Cullen Bunn, Alex Guimaraes, and Jonas Scharf

Bone Parish, Vol. 2 , Cullen Bunn and Jonas Scharf

Bone Parish, Vol. 3 , Cullen Bunn and Jonas Scharf

Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights , Stefano Zuffi

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World , Pénélope Bagieu

Breakfast of Champions , Kurt Vonnegut

Cézanne: Mont Sainte Victoire , Federico Zeri

Chagall: The Falling Angel , Federico Zeri

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , Marcia Williams

Citrus Plus, Vol. 1 , Saburouta

Citrus Plus, Vol. 2 , Saburouta

Complete Guide to Drawing and Painting , Reader’s Digest Editors

Coyotes, Vol. 1 , Sean Lewis

Coyotes, Vol. 2 , Sean Lewis

Crime and Punishment: The Graphic Novel , Osamu Tezuka

Dali: The Persistence of Memory , Federico Zeri

Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman , Sharon Rudahl

Deadly Class , Rick Remender, Lee Loughridge, and Wesley Craig

Deep Dark Fears , Fran Krause

Degas: Impressions of a Great Master , Gerhard Gruitrooy

Degas: The Dance Class , Federico Zeri

Democracy , Alecos Papadatos, Abraham Kawa, and Annie Di Donna

Discovering Mythology: Gods and Goddesses , Wendy Mass

Don’t Know Much About Mythology: Everything You Need to Know About the Greatest Stories in Human History But Never Learned , Kenneth C. Davis

Edward Hopper: A Modern Master , Ita G. Berkow

Epileptic , David B.

Fantastic Four by Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo: Ultimate Collection – Book One (Fantastic Four 1998-2012) , Mark Waid

Feynman , Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film , Edward Ross

Fire Force, Vol. 1 , Atsushi Ohkubo

Flawed , Andrea Dorfman

Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe , Hunter Drohojowska-Philip

Gender Danger: Survivors of Rape, Human Trafficking, and Honor Killings , Rae Simons

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation , Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman

Giant Days , John Allison, Lissa Treiman, and Max Sarin

Gilgamesh: A Graphic Novel , Andrew Winegarner

Girl Talk: The Ultimate Body & Puberty Book for Girls , editors of Cider Mill Press and Chris Vallo

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations , Mira Jacob

Graphic Classics Volume 8: Mark Twain – 2nd Edition , Mark Twain

Graphic Classics: Bram Stoker , Tom Pomplun

Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe , Tom Pomplun

Graphic Design: A New History , Stephen J. Eskilson

Grass , Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

Great Masterpieces of the World , Irene Korn

Green River Killer: A True Detective Story , Jeff Jensen

Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work , Britt Salvesen

Himawari House , Harmony Becker

History of Western Art in Comics Part One: From Prehistory to the Renaissance , Marion Augustin and Bruno Heitz

Hitler’s Final Solution , John Allen

Hollow City: The Graphic Novel , Ransom Riggs and Cassandra Jean

Holocaust Camps and Killing Centers , Craig E. Blohm

Holocaust Rescue and Liberation , Craig E. Blohm

Holocaust Resistance , Craig E. Blohm

Home After Dark , David Small

Home Body , Rupi Kaur

Horde , Marguerite Bennett and Leila Leiz

How It All Blew Up , Arvin Ahmadi

How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual , Rebecca Burgess

How to Read Italian Renaissance Painting , Stefano Zuffi

I Hate Fairyland, Vol. 1: Madly Ever After , Skottie Young

Irving Penn: A Career In Photography , Colin Westerbeck

Ivy , Sarah Oleksyk

Kandinsky: The First Abstract Watercolour Painting , Federico Zeri

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation , Octavia E. Butler, Damian Duffy, and John Jennings

King of King Court , Travis Dandro

Kingdom of the Wicked , Ian Edginton and D’Israeli

Kiss Number 8 , Colleen A.F. Venable and Ellen T. Crenshaw

Last Man: The Royal Cup , Balak, Michaël Sanlaville, and Bastien Vivès

Leonardo and the Last Supper , Ross King

Leonardo: Revised Edition , Martin Kemp

Life in a Nazi Concentration Camp , Don Nardo

Lighter Than My Shadow , Katie Green

Locke & Key Vol. 1: Welcome To Lovecraft , Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

Locke & Key, Vol. 5: Clockworks , Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

Locke & Key, Vol. 6: Alpha & Omega , Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

Looking at Paintings , Jude Welton

Macbeth: The Graphic Novel , adapted by John McDonald

Magritte: The Human Condition , Federico Zeri

Man Ray: The Paris Years , Michael R. Taylor

Manet: Le Dejeuner sur L'herbe , Federico Zeri

Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein , Lita Judge

Matisse: La Danse , Federico Zeri

Medusa , Jessie Burton

Michelangelo: Master of the Italian Renaissance , Gabrielle Di Cagno

Mirror of the World: A New History of Art , Julian Bell

Modigliani: Reclining Nude , Federico Zeri

Monstress , Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Munch: The Scream , Federico Zeri

My Last Summer With Cass , Mark Crilley

My Riot , Rick Spears and Emmett Hobbes

Mythology , Anne Wright

Myths, Legends & Sacred Stories: A Visual Encyclopedia , Philip Wilkinson

Oryx and Crake , Magaret Atwood

Pablo: Art Masters Series , Julie Birmant and Clement Oubrerie

Parenthesis , Élodie Durand

Patience , Daniel Clowes

Penultimate Quest , Lars Brown

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood , Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return , Marjane Satrapi

Pierce Brown’s Red Rising: Sons of Ares – An Original Graphic Novel , Pierce Brown, Rik Hoskin, and Eli Powell

Puberty Is Gross But Also Really Awesome , Gina Loveless and Lauri Johnston

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything , Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen

Queen of the Sea , Dylan Meconis

Raphael: His Life, Works, and Times , Eugene Muntz

Raphael: School of Athens , edited by Marcia Hall

Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present , Deborah Willis

Rembrandt: Supper at Emmaus , Federico Zeri

Renoir: Moulin de la Galette , Federico Zeri

Rubens: Garden of Love , Federico Zeri

Scene of the Crime: Tracking Down Criminals With Forensic Science , H.P. Newquist

Scenic Art for the Theatre: History, Tools, and Techniques , Susan Crabtree and Peter Beudert

Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe , Bryan Lee O’Malley

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness , Kristen Radtke

Sex Plus: Learning, Loving, and Enjoying Your Body , Laci Green

Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Manga Edition , William Shakespeare, Crystal S. Chan, and Julien Choy

Shattered Warrior , Sharon Shinn and Molly Knox Ostertag

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: The Authorized Graphic Adaptation , Miles Hyman

Sirens , Mary Schulte

Slaughterhouse-Five , Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel , Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, and Albert Monteys

SP4RX , Wren McDonald

Speak: The Graphic Novel , Laurie Hale Anderson and Emily Carroll

Spinning , Tillie Walden

Stiegliz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes , edited by Richard Whelan

Storytelling in Christian Art from Biotto to Donatello , Jules Lubbock

Sumomomo, Momomo: The Strongest Bride on Earth, Vol. 1 , Shinobu Ohtaka

Super Sisters , Christopher Cazenove

SuperMutant Magic Academy , Jillian Tamaki

The Ancient Greeks , Virginia Schomp

The Annotated Mona Lisa, Third Edition: A Crash Court in Art History from Prehistoric to the Present (Volume 3) , Carol Strickland

The Third Reich: The Apparatus of Death , Time-Life Books

The Art of Comics , Stuart A. Kallen

The Beautiful Stories of Life: Six Greek Myths, Retold , Cynthia Rylant

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir , Thi Bui

The Black Monday Murders , Jonathan Hickman and Tomm Coker

The Cape: Fallen , Joe Hill, Jason Ciaramella, Nelson Daniel, and Zach Howard

The Cape: 1969 , Joe Hill, Jason Ciaramella, and Nelson Daniel

The Children’s Bible , Sally Tagholm

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Drawing Manga: Illustrated , John Layman

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Drawing People Illustrated , Brenda Hoddinott

The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale , Art Spiegelman

The Creeps: A Deep Dark Fears Collection , Fran Krause

The Daughters of Ys , M.T. Anderson and Jo Rioux

The Deadliest Diseases Then and Now , Deborah Hopkinson

The Essential Claude Monet , Catherine Morris

The Essential Edward Hopper , Justin Spring

The Essential Henri Matisse , Ingrid Schaffner

The Essential Hieronymus Bosch , John W. Campbell

The Essential Johannes Vermeer , Christopher Sweet

The Essential Mary Cassatt , Georgette Gouveia

The Essential Michelangelo , Klaus Ottmann

The Essential Pablo Picasso , Ingrid Schaffner

The Essential Salvador Dalí , Robert Goff

The Essential Vincent van Gogh , Ingrid Schaffner 

The Fire Never Goes Out: A Memoir in Pictures , N.D. Stevenson

The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation , Jonathan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell

The Giver: Graphic Novel , Lois Lowry and P. Craig Russell

The Golden Sheep 1 , Kaori Ozaki

The Good Earth (Graphic Adaptation) , Pearl S. Buck and Nick Bertozzi

The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel , Margaret Atwood and Renee Nault

The Hill , Ali Bryan

The History of Art , A.N. Hodge

The History of the Blues , Andy Koopmans

The History of Western Painting , Virginia Forte

The History of Western Sculpture , Peter Osier

The Human Body in Action , Barbara Gallavotti

The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry , David L. Carlson and Landis Blair

The Invisible War: A Tale on Two Scales , Ailsa Wild

The Last Halloween: Children , Abby Howard

The League of Super Feminists , Mirion Malle

The Life and Art of Paul Gauguin , George Roddam

The Low, Low Woods , Carmen Maria Machado and Dani

The Mythics #1: Heroes Reborn , Patrick Sobral, Patricia Lyfoung, Philippe Ogaki, and Jenny

The Renaissance , Anne Fitzpatrick

The Sacrifice of Darkness , Roxane Gay and Traci Lynne Oliver

The Stranger: The Graphic Novel , Albert Camus and Jacques Ferrandez

The Sun and Her Flowers , Rupi Kaur

The Walking Dead , Robert Kirkman

Toulouse-Lautrec: At the Moulin Rouge , Federico Zeri

Vermeer: The Astronomer , Federico Zeri

Violet and Daisy: The Story of Vaudeville’s Famous Conjoined Twins , Sarah Miller

Watchmen , Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

What to Do When I’m Gone: A Mother’s Wisdom to Her Daughter , Suzy Hopkins and Hallie Bateman

Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere , Hillary L. Chute

Woman World , Aminder Dhaliwal

Women , Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag

Wraith , Joe Hill and Charles Paul Wilson

Writing and Illustrating the Graphic Novel: Everything You Need to Know to Create Great Graphic Works , Mike Chinn

X-Men: Age of X , Mike Carey and Clay Mann

Zahra’s Paradise , Amir & Khalil

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor , Layla Saad

North Carolina

North dakota.

A Court of Frost and Starlight , Sarah J. Maas

Living Dead Girl , Elizabeth Scott

People Kill People , Ellen Hopkins

Pennsylvania

Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen , Jazz Jennings

Dreaming in Cuban , Cristina García

Outlander , Diana Gabaldon

The Family Book , Todd Parr

The Gender Quest Workbook: A Guide for Teens and Young Adults Exploring Gender Identity , Rylan Jay Testa, Deborah Coolhart, and Jayme Peta

South Carolina

A Lesson in Vengeance , Victoria Lee

All Boys Aren’t Blue , George M. Johnson

Black Is a Rainbow Color , Angela Joy and Ekua Holmes

City of Heavenly Fire , Cassandra Clare

Confess , Colleen Hoover

Cool for the Summer , Dahlia Adler

Forever for a Year , B.T. Gottfred

grl2grl , Julie Anne Peters

Hopeless , Colleen Hoover

Last Night at the Telegraph Club , Malinda Lo

Layla , Colleen Hoover

Lolita , Vladimir Nabokov

November 9 , Colleen Hoover

Red at the Bone , Jacqueline Woodson

Shine , Lauren Myracle

Skin , Adrienne Maria Vrettos

Stamped (for Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You , Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You , Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

The Fixer , Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Lovely Bones , Alice Sebold 

What Riley Wore , Elana K. Arnold

Wintergirls , Laurie Halse Anderson

yolo , Lauren Myracle

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me , Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) , L.C. Rosen

47 , Walter Mosley

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Graphic Novel) , Jules Verne, Dan Rafter, and Bhupendra Ahluwalia

A + E 4ever , I. Merey.

A Baby Doesn’t Make the Man: Alternative Sources of Power and Manhood for Young Men , Raymond Jamiolkowski

A Clash of Kings , George R.R. Martin

A Dance With Dragons , George R.R. Martin

A Feast for Crows , George R.R. Martin.

A Game of Thrones , George R.R. Martin

A Good Kind of Trouble , Lisa Moore Ramée

A Million Shades of Gray , Cynthia Kadohata

A Rational Explanation , Tiffany Youngblood

A Sense of the Infinite , Hilary T. Smith

A Storm of Swords , George R.R. Martin

Acceptance , Jeff VanderMeer

Adventures of a Kid Magician , Justin Flom

After , Amy Efaw

Afterward , Jennifer Mathieu

Afterworlds , Scott Westerfeld

Aleutian Sparrow , Karen Hesse

All American Boys , Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages , edited by Saundra Mitchell

All the Bad Apples , Moïra Fowley-Doyle

Always and Forever, Lara Jean , Jenny Han

Ambush , Obert Skye

American Gods , Neil Gaiman

An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 , Jim Murphy

Anansi Boys , Neil Gaiman

And I Darken , Kiersten White

And Still I Rise: Black America Since MLK , Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kevin M. Burke

And They Lived…  Steven Salvatore

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation , Ari Folman and David Polonsky

Anne of Avonlea , L.M. Montgomery

Annihilation , Jeff VanderMeer

Antonio’s Card/La Tarjeta de Antonio , Rigoberto González and Cecilia Álvarez

Ark Angel , Anthony Horowitz

As I Descended , Robin Talley

Ash , Malinda Lo

Asking for It , Louise O’Neill

Authority , Jeff VanderMeer

Before We Were Free , Julia Alvarez

Better Than Perfect , Simone Elkeles

Bird Box , Josh Malerman

Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays , Stephen Hawking

Blue Bloods , Melissa de la Cruz

Blue Bloods: After Life , Melissa de la Cruz

Blue Window , Adina Rishe Gewirtz

Bodies Are Cool , Tyler Feder

Brave Face: A Memoir , Shaun David Hutchinson

Breaking Dawn , Stephanie Meyer

Brisingr , Christopher Paolini

Broken Beautiful Hearts , Kami Garcia

Brown v. Board of Education: A Fight for Simple Justice Rubin , Susan Goldman Rubin

Catwoman: Soulstealer , Sarah J. Maas, Louise Simonson, and Samantha Dodge

Challenger Deep , Neal Shusterman

Check, Please! (#Hockey Book 1) , Ngozi Ukazu

Cherry , Lindsey Rosin

Cheshire Crossing , Andy Weir and Sarah Andersen

Chicken Girl , Heather Smith

Choke , Obert Skye

City Love , Susane Colasant

City of Light, City of Dark , Avi and Brian Floca

Code of Honor , Alan Gratz

Consent , Nancy Ohlin

Court of Lions , Somaiya Daud

Criss Cross , Lynne Rae Perkins

Cursed Pirate Girl , Jeremy A. Bastian

Cut Both Ways , Carrie Mesrobian

D-Day: The World War II Invasion that Changed History , Deborah Hopkinson

Date Me, Bryson Keller , Kevin van Whye

Dateable: Are You? Are They?  Justin Lookadoo and Hayley DiMarco

Dead Inside , Cyndy Drew Etler

Deadly Class , Rick Remender

Dear Diary, I’m Pregnant: Teenagers Talk About Their Pregnancy , interviews by Anrenee Englander

Dear Justyce , Nic Stone

Defy the Night , Brigid Kemmerer

Dicey’s Song , Cynthia Voigt

Doomraga’s Revenge , T.A. Barron

Eagle Strike , Anthony Horowitz

Eden Conquered , Joelle Charbonneau

Eldest , Christopher Paolini

Eleanor Roosevelt, Fighter for Justice: Her Impact on the Civil Rights Movement, the White House, and the World , Ilene Cooper

Emergency Contact , Mary H.K. Choi

Eragon , Christopher Paolini

Even If I Fall , Abigail Johnson

Every Hidden Thing , Kenneth Oppel

Eyes of the Forest , April Henry

Falling Over Sideways , Jordan Sonnenblick

Fire Star , Chris d’Lacey

Fire Will Fall , Carol Plum-Ucci

Firebug , Lish McBride

Forbidden , Tabitha Suzuma

Friends Forever , Shannon Hale and Leuyen Pham

From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun , Jacqueline Woodson

Frost Like Night , Sara Raasch

Gates of Paradise , Melissa de la Cruz

Gender Identity (Teen Mental Health) , Nicki Peter Petrikowski

Gender Issues , Kenneth McIntosh

Girl, (Nearly) 16: Absolute Torture , Sue Limb

Girls Like Us , Gail Giles

Glitter , Babygirl Daniels

Go With the Flow , Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann

Grown in Sixty Seconds , Darrien Lee

Hands Up!: Celebrating Black Joy Every Day , Breanna J. McDaniel and Shane W. Evans

Home for the Holidays , Heather Vogel Frederick

Home Run , Tim Green

Fat Angie: Homecoming , E.E. Charlton-Trujillo

Hooked , Catherine Greenman

House of Dark Shadows , Robert Liparulo

How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity , edited by Michael Cart

I am Jazz , Jessica Herthel, Jazz Jennings, and Shelagh McNicholas

If I Stay , Gayle Forman

If You Could Be Mine , Sara Farizan

Illegal , Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin, and Giovanni Rigano

In the Lake of the Woods , Tim O’Brien

Infinity Son , Adam Silvera

Inheritance , Christopher Paolini

Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d , Mary Losure

Jay’s Gay Agenda , Jason June

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Part 1 - Phantom Blood, Vol. 1 , Hirohiko Araki

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Part 1 - Phantom Blood, Vol. 2 , Hirohiko Araki

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Part 1 - Phantom Blood, Vol. 3 , Hirohiko Araki

King and the Dragonflies , Kacen Callender

King’s Cage , Victoria Aveyard

Lady Midnight , Cassandra Clare

Leaving Paradise , Simone Elkeles

Left Out , Tim Green

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War , Karen Abbott

Life Is Funny , E.R. Frank

Little Blog on the Prairie , Cathleen Davitt Bell

Lord of Shadows , Cassandra Clare

Lost in Time , Melissa de la Cruz

M.L.K.: Journey of a King , Tonya Bolden

Man Walks on the Moon , Valerie Bodden

Mara: Daughter of the Nile , Eloise Jarvis McGraw

Masquerade , Melissa de la Cruz

Master Keaton , Naoki Urasawa, Hokusei Katsushika, and Takashi Nagasaki

Merlin’s Dragon , T.A. Barron

Messenger , Lois Lowry

Misguided Angel , Melissa de la Cruz

Moxie , Jennifer Mathieu

The Murder Complex , Lindsay Cummings

Ninth House , Leigh Bardugo

Now I Rise , Kiersten White

Now That We’re Men: A Play and True Life Accounts of Boys, Sex & Power , edited by Katie Capiello

Odd One Out , Nic Stone

One of Us is Next , Karen M. McManus

Ordinary Hazards , Nikki Grimes

Original Fake , Kristin Cronn-Mills and E. Eero Johnson

P. S. I Still Love You , Jenny Han

Parable of the Sower , Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Talents , Octavia E. Butler.

Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights , Rob Sanders and Jared Andrew Schorr

Peak , Roland Smith

Pillage , Obert Skye

Point Blank , Anthony Horowitz

Poisoned , Jennifer Donnelly

A Painful History of Medicine: Pox, Pus + Plague , John Townsend

Prey , Michael Crichton

Queen of Air and Darkness , Cassandra Clare

Queen of Shadows , Sarah J. Maas

Queer, There and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World , Sarah Prager

Queer: The Ultimate LGBTQ Guide for Teens , Kathy Belge and Marke Bieschke

Rat Queens , Kurtis J. Wiebe and Ryan Ferrier

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen , Lucy Knisley

Reluctantly Alice , Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Revelations , Melissa de la Cruz

Rogue Wave , Jennifer Donnelly

Salt to the Sea , Ruta Sepetys

Schooled , Gordon Korman

Scorpia , Anthony Horowitz

Scorpia Rising , Anthony Horowitz

Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregatio n , Duncan Tonatiuh

Shadows on the Stars , T.A. Barron

Shadowsong , S. Jae-Jones

S hine , Lauren Myracle

Skeleton Key , Anthony Horowitz

Snakehead , Anthony Horowitz

Sonny’s House of Spies , George Ella Lyon

Soul Eater , Atushi Ohkubo

Soupy Leaves Home , Cecil Castellucci

Space Battle Lunchtime, Vol. 2: A Recipe for Disaster , Natalie Riess

Spy x Family , Tatsuya Endo

Stolen , Lucy Christopher

Stormbreaker , Anthony Horowitz

Strange the Dreame r , Laini Taylor

S triving for Equality: LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field , Kirsti Cronn-Mills

Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083 , Andrea White

Symptoms of Being Human , Jeff Garvin

Tattoo Atlas , Tim Floreen

Teenage Sex and Pregnancy , Peggy J. Parks

Teens and LGBT Issues , Christine Wilcox

The Battle Against Polio , Stephanie True Peters

The Beauty of Darkness , Mary E. Pearson

The Big Questions Book of Sex & Consent , Donna Freitas

The Book of Magic , T.A. Barron

The Boy Who Dared , Susan Campbell Bartoletti

The Bridge , Bill Konigsberg

The Camelot Betrayal , Kiersten White

The Chupacabra , Jean Flitcroft

The City We Became , N.K. Jemisin

The Country of Ice Cream Star , Sandra Newman

The Dark and Hollow Places , Carrie Ryan

The Dark Tide , Alicia Jasinska

The Dazzling Heights , Katharine McGee

The Dead and the Dark , Courtney Gould

The Dead-Tossed Waves , Carrie Ryan

The Death of Bees , Lisa O’Donnell

The Devil’s Intern , Donna Hosie

The Dirt on Mr. Claxton , Tiffany Youngblood

The Duel: The Parallel Lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr , Judith St. George

The Edge , Roland Smith

The Epidemic , Suzanne Young

The Eternal Flame , T.A. Barron

The Exact Opposite of Okay , Laura Steven

The Fellowship of the Ring , J.R.R. Tolkien

The Fire , James Patterson

The Fires of Merlin , T.A. Barron

The Forest of Hands and Teeth , Carrie Ryan

Theodore Boone: The Fugitive , John Grisham

The Gadgets , Anthony Horowitz

The Gift , James Patterson and Ned Rust

The Girls I’ve Been , Tess Sharpe

The Giver , Lois Lowry

The Grand Escape: The Greatest Prison Breakout of the 20th Century , Neal Bascomb

The Great American Whatever , Tim Federle

The Great Tree of Avalon: Child of the Dark Prophecy , T.A. Barron

The Grief Keeper , Alexandra Villasante

The Grimm Legacy , Polly Shulman

The Heart of Betrayal , Mary E. Pearson

The Hobbit , J.R.R. Tolkien

The Immortalists , Chloe Benjamin

The Kiss , James Patterson and Jill Dembowski

The Kiss of Deception , Mary E. Pearson

The Line , Teri Hall

The Lost , James Patterson and Emily Raymond

The Lost Years of Merlin , T.A. Barron 

The Mark , Jen Nadol

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiy a , Nagaru Tanigawa

The Mirror of Merlin , T.A. Barron

The Misfits , James Howe

The November Criminals , Sam Munson

The Ocean at the End of the Lane , Neil Gaiman

The Pacific Giants , Jean Flitcroft

The Phantom Twin , Lisa Brown

The Pride Guide: A Guide to Sexual and Social Health for LGBTQ Youth , Jo Langford

The Program , Suzanne Young

The Remedy , Suzanne Young

The Return of the King , J.R.R. Tolkien

The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh , Candace Fleming

The River , Gary Paulsen

The Seven Songs of Merlin , T.A. Barron

The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya , Nagaru Tanigawa

The Squad: Killer Spirit , Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Storm in the Barn , Matt Phelan

The Teenage Guy’s Survival Guide: The Real Deal on Going Out, Growing Up, and Other Guy Stuff , Jeremy Daldry

The Test , Peggy Kern

The Thousandth Floor , Katharine McGee

The Towering Sky , Katharine McGee

The Treatment , Suzanne Young

The Two Towers , J.R.R. Tolkien

The Van Alen Legacy , Melissa de la Cruz

The Wings of Merlin , T.A. Barron

The Yellow Birds , Kevin Powers

Theodore Boone: The Abduction , John Grisham

Theodore Boone: The Accomplice , John Grisham

Theodore Boone: The Accused , John Grisham

Theodore Boone: The Activist , John Grisham

Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer , John Grisham

Theodore Boone: The Scandal , John Grisham

There’s No Place Like Home , Jen Calonita

They Both Die at the End , Adam Silvera

They Called Themselves The K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group , Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Those That Wake , Jesse Karp

Timescape , Robert Liparulo

Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices , Kirstin Cronn-Mills

Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Rustin, the Man Behind the March on Washington , Jacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle, and Michael G. Long

Turtles All the Way Down , John Green

Ultimate Magic , T.A. Barron.

Unbecoming: A Memoir of Disobedience , Anuradha Bhagwati

Victoria and the Rogue , Meg Cabot

Walk Two Moons , Sharon Creech

War Storm , Victoria Aveyard

Watch Over Me , Nina LaCour

Watcher in the Woods: A Rockton Novel , Kelley Armstrong

We Can’t Be Friends: A True Story , Cyndy Drew Etler

We March , Shane W. Evans

We’ll Always Have Summer , Jenny Han

What Girls Are Made Of , Elana K. Arnold

What Goes Around , Denene Millner

What We Saw , Aaron Hartzler

Will Grayson, Will Grayson , John Green and David Levithan

Willful Machines , Tim Floreen

Wintersong , S. Jae-Jones

Witch and Wizard , James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet

Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland , Sally M. Walker

Y ou Killed Wesley Payne , Sean Beaudoin

Zombies Don’t Cry , Rusty Fischer

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out , Susan Kuklin

Daughters Unto Devils , Amy Lukavics

Heartstopper , Alice Oseman

House of Sky and Breath , Sarah J. Maas

Loving Frank , Nancy Horan

Man o’ War , Cory McCarthy

Maybe Not , Colleen Hoover

Normal People , Sally Rooney

Private Label , Kelly Yang

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan , Lisa See

The Cost of Knowing , Brittney Morris

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky , Heidi W. Durrow

The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy , B.T. Gottfred

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue , V.E. Schwab

The Lovely Bones , Sebold, Alice

The Truth About Alice , Jennifer Mathieu

ttfn , Lauren Myracle

Ugly Love , Colleen Hoover

Verity , Colleen Hoover

Anatomy of a Boyfriend , Daria Snadowsky

Anatomy of a Single Girl , Daria Snadowsky

Fences , August Wilson

Red Hood ,  Elana K. Arnold

Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression , Iris Gottlieb

Tar Baby , Toni Morrison

The Tale of the Body Thief , Anne Rice

Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource by and for Transgender Communities , edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth

How to Stream Interview with the Vampire

Jessica Gunning on the Success of “Baby Reindeer”

Everything We Know About The Bear Season 3

An Activist and Artist on Finding Their Purpose

In Defense of the Pretty Good Show

How to Stream The Iron Claw

“The Idea of You” Took Inspo From Jane Birkin

The 55 Best Comedy Films of All Time

A New Book Shows a Different Side of Kaia Gerber

The Ending of The Idea of You , Explained

Cher’s Best Acting Roles, Ranked

• HISTORY & CULTURE

The history of book bans—and their changing targets—in the U.S.

​Recent years have seen a record-breaking number of attempts to ban books. Here's how book banning emerged—and how it turned school libraries into battlegrounds.

Mark Twain. Harriet Beecher Stowe. William Shakespeare. These names share something more than a legacy of classic literature and a place on school curriculums: They’re just some of the many authors whose work has been banned from classrooms over the years for content deemed controversial, obscene, or otherwise objectionable by authorities.

Judy Blume is on this esteemed list. Her 1970 best seller Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret — recently adapted for film for the first time— has been challenged in schools across the United States for its portrayal of female puberty and religion.

Even Anne Frank 's Diary of a Young Girl has been targeted for censorship—not for its depiction of a young Jewish girl whose family is persecuted by Nazi Germany, but for the passages where the teen discusses her changing body .

Book banning never seems to leave the headlines. In fact, the American Library Association reports that there were a record-breaking number of attempts to ban books in 2022—up 38 percent from the previous year. Of those challenges, the organization notes , "the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color."  

( Did Ovid's erotic poetry lead to his exile from Rome? )

Though censorship is as old as writing, its targets have shifted over the centuries. Here’s how book banning emerged in the United States—stretching as far back as when some of the nation’s territories were British colonies—and how censorship affects modern readers today.

Religion in the early colonial era

Most of the earliest book bans were spurred by religious leaders, and by the time Great Britain founded its colonies in America, it had a longstanding history of book censorship. In 1650, prominent Massachusetts Bay colonist William Pynchon published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption , a pamphlet that argued that anyone who was obedient to God and followed Christian teachings on Earth could get into heaven. This flew in the face of Puritan Calvinist beliefs that only a special few were predestined for God’s favor.

Outraged, Pynchon’s fellow colonists denounced him as a heretic, burned his pamphlet, and banned it—the first event of its kind in what would later become the U.S. Only four copies of his controversial tract survive today.

Slavery and the Civil War

In the first half of the 19th century, materials about the nation’s most incendiary issue, the enslavement of people, alarmed would-be censors in the South. By the 1850s, multiple states had outlawed expressing anti-slavery sentiments—which abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe defied in 1851 with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin , a novel that aimed to expose the evils of slavery.

As historian Claire Parfait notes, the book was publicly burned and banned by slaveholders along with other anti-slavery books. In Maryland, free Black minister Sam Green was sentenced to 10 years in the state penitentiary for owning a copy of the book.

As the Civil War roiled in the 1860s, the pro-slavery South continued to ban abolitionist materials while Union authorities banned pro-Southern literature like John Esten Cook’s biography of Stonewall Jackson.

A war against 'immorality'

In 1873, the war against books went federal with the passage of the Comstock Act, a congressional law that made it illegal to possess “obscene” or “immoral” texts or articles or send them through the mail. Championed by moral crusader Anthony Comstock, the laws were designed to ban both content about sexuality and birth control—which at the time, was widely available via mail order.

The law criminalized the activities of birth control advocates and forced popular pamphlets like Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation underground, restricting the dissemination of knowledge about contraception at a time when open discussion about sexuality was taboo and infant and maternal mortality were rampant. It remained in effect until 1936. ( Read more about the complex early history of abortion in the United States .)

Meanwhile, obscenity was also a prime target in Boston, the capital of the state that had sanctioned the first book burning in the U.S. Boston’s book censors challenged everything they considered “indecent,” from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass , which the society’s president called a “darling   morsel of literary filth,” to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms .

The New England Watch and Ward Society, a private organization that included many of Boston’s most elite residents, petitioned against printed materials they found objectionable, sued booksellers, pressured law enforcement and courts to bring obscenity charges against authors, and spurred the Boston Public Library to lock copies of the most controversial books, including books by Balzac and Zola, in a restricted room known as the Inferno.

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By the 1920s, Boston was so notorious for banning books that authors intentionally printed their books there in hopes that the inevitable ban would give them a publicity boost elsewhere in the country.

Schools and libraries become battlegrounds

Even as social mores relaxed in the 20th century, school libraries remained sites of contentious battles about what kind of information should be available to children in an age of social progress and the modernization of American society.   Parents and administrators grappled over both fiction and nonfiction during school board and library commission meetings.

The reasons for the proposed bans varied: Some books challenged longstanding narratives about American history or social norms; others were deemed problematic for its language or for sexual or political content.

The Jim Crow-era South was a particular hotbed for book censorship. The United Daughters of the Confederacy made several successful attempts to ban school textbooks that did not offer a sympathetic view of the South’s loss in the Civil War. There were also attempts to ban The Rabbits’ Wedding,   a 1954 children’s book by Garth Williams that depicted a white rabbit marrying a black rabbit, because opponents felt it encouraged interracial relationships. ( How Jim Crow laws created "slavery by another name." )

These attempted bans tended to have a chilling effect on librarians afraid to acquire material that could be considered controversial. But some school and public librarians began to organize instead. They responded to a rash of challenges against books McCarthy-era censors felt encouraged Communism or socialism during the 1950s and fought attempted bans on books like Huckleberry Finn , The Catcher in the Rye , To Kill a Mockingbird and even The Canterbury Tales .

A constitutional right to read

In 1969, the Supreme Court weighed in on students’ right to free expression. In Tinker v. Des Moines,   a case involving students who wore black armbands protesting the Vietnam War to school, the court ruled 7-2 that “neither teachers nor students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

In 1982, the Supreme Court overtly addressed schoolbooks in a case involving a group of students who sued a New York school board for removing books by authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Langston Hughes that the board deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.”

“Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books,” the court ruled in Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico , citing students’ First Amendment rights.

Nonetheless, librarians contended with so many book challenges in the early 1980s that they created Banned Book Week, an annual event centered around the freedom to read. During Banned Book Week, the literary and library community raises awareness about commonly challenged books and First Amendment freedoms.

Modern censorship

Still, book challenges are more common than ever. Between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022 alone, there were 1,586 book bans in 86 school districts across 26 states—affecting more than two million students, according to PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free speech. Stories featuring LGBTQ+ issues or protagonists were a “major target” of bans, the group wrote, while other targets included book with storylines about race and racism, sexual content or sexual assault, and death and grief. Texas led the charge against books; its 713 bans were nearly double that of other states.

According to the American Library Association, the most challenged book of 2022 was Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer , a memoir about what it means to be nonbinary. Other books on the most-challenged list include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye   and Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower .

First Amendment advocate Pat Scales , a veteran South Carolina middle- and high-school librarian and former chair of the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, notes that outright censorship is only one face of book bans. Shelving books in inaccessible places, defacing them, or marking them with reading levels that put them out of students’ reach also keep books out of would-be readers’ hands, and challenges of any kind can create a chilling effect for librarians.

“Censorship is about control,” Scales wrote in 2007 in the book Scales on Censorship . “Intellectual freedom is about respect.”

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

The rise in book bans, explained

Book challenges in America aren’t new — but over the past year, they’ve reached a fever pitch. A majority of the books that have been targeted nationwide focus on sexual orientation, gender identity, race and racism. Consider “ The Hate U Give ” by Angie Thomas, which has been challenged for an alleged anti-police agenda, and “ This Book Is Gay ” by Juno Dawson, a nonfiction book about sexuality and gender.

The situation is “unprecedented in its scale, and in the proliferation of organized groups who are trying to remove whole lists of books at once in multiple school districts, across a growing number of states,” says Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, an advocacy group.

These are books school systems don’t want you to read, and why

According to an April report from PEN America, there were 1,586 instances of individual books being banned during the nine-month period from July 1, 2021, to March 31, affecting 1,145 book titles. Texas had the most bans (713), followed by Pennsylvania (456), Florida (204) and Oklahoma (43). That’s an “alarming” spike, compared with previous years, the group notes.

“From my place in the world, I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, who started working for the organization in 2000. She noted that social media is amplifying the situation. “A parent will stand up, do this impassioned speech about obscenity in school libraries in Virginia, and it goes viral on Facebook.”

The next book ban: States aim to limit titles students can search for

Amid the heated discussions about the issue, sometimes terminology can become muddled. To help clarify, we spoke to experts about the difference between a challenge and a ban, why books are challenged and when the current wave began. Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions:

There's More to That

A Smithsonian magazine podcast

A Brief History of Banned Books in America

Attempts to restrict what kids in school can read are on the rise. But American book banning started with the Puritans, 140 years before the United States

Chris Klimek

Host, " There's More to That "

The American Library Association reports that 2022 saw more attempts to have books removed from schools and public libraries than in any prior year this century—indeed, it documented nearly twice as many attempted bans in 2022 than in 2021. Notably, the common thread in these aggressive efforts is the subject that binds the most-challenged titles: Most of them address themes of LGBT+ identity or gender expression.

On our latest episode of the Smithsonian magazine podcast “There’s More to That,” I talk with journalist Colleen Connolly about Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan , the first book ever to be suppressed in North America. What did the Puritans find so threatening about it, and how has this book echoed through subsequent centuries? Then I’m joined by Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, for a wide-ranging conversation about the history of book bans in the United States, how a resurgent wave of book bans in many states differs from those of prior eras and why organized attempts to prevent specific people from reading specific books usually fail.

A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That” and listen to past episodes on  J. Robert Oppenheimer ,  the vanishing Colorado River,   the OceanGate Titan disaster and more, find us on  Apple Podcasts ,  Spotify  or wherever you get your podcasts.

Chris Klimek: Dr. Carla Hayden is the librarian of Congress.

Carla Hayden: Because my mom is not listening, you can call me Carla. The librarian of Congress is the chief administrator for the world’s largest library that serves Congress as well as the people that Congress serves. It’s a collection that includes items of history, like the draft of the Declaration of Independence, but also musical instruments, films, recordings and all that.

Klimek: Carla has been a librarian for half a century. When it comes to book banning, she’s seen it all. But her core philosophy is that readers should have access to as many titles as possible, even the materials they may not agree with.

Hayden: It’s really the philosophy of the library profession that free people should read freely and that there’s a power in being able to select what you want to read. And sometimes it’s essential to be able to have access to different topics, different points of views. And so we really believe strongly that people should have access as much as possible to materials that can help them in life to understand themselves and to understand others.

Klimek: Carla often laughs when she thinks about some of the books that have been subjects of controversy over the years.

Hayden: One, I had to smile because I remember, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret , with menstruation and all that. That was like, “Oh my God, it’s in print.” But the one that is now seen as a classic and pretty tame was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.

She was unrepentant about spying. She was a kind of, not just quirky, but a little testy, little something. And they thought, “Oh my goodness, this is not a good role model for kids.” But we all knew a kid or two like that, and some of us were, maybe, and now that seems old-fashioned. “Oh, that’s what you’re doing. You didn’t even have social media.”

Klimek: This episode is being released right in the middle of Banned Books Week in America. The American Library Association has put on this event every year since 1982 as a kind of corrective, but in recent years, things have picked up. More books are being contested; there are more aggressive efforts to ban multiple books at once. And, as Carla told us, the types of books causing controversy have changed.

Hayden: What has been interesting to see is the counterproposals where people are saying, “No, we want to read these books” or “We want our young people to have access to these books.” And there even have been underground railroads for these banned books. One of the surest ways—I think most people listening will know—if you tell young people what they can’t do, especially if they can’t read something, their first instinct is, “I want to see what’s in this book.”

Klimek: From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show where things that are old sometimes become new again. On this week’s episode, we learned about the first book ever to be banned in America and what it has to do with the book bans we’re seeing today. I’m Chris Klimek—let’s dive in.

Colleen Connolly: So New English Canaan , it’s a book that was published in 1637, so that’s almost 400 years ago.

Klimek: Colleen Connolly recently wrote a piece for Smithsonian about New English Canaan , the first book to be banned in what is now the United States of America. Colleen spoke to us from her home office, where the birds outside her window were quite active.

Connolly: There’s the sound right now, so I apologize for the bird noises.

Klimek: Oh, no, don’t apologize. I’m finding it quite soothing.

Connolly: It’s really relaxing, I’m not going to lie.

Klimek: What is New English Canaan about?

Connolly: It’s a three-volume book written by a guy named Thomas Morton, so it’s part ethnography. He writes a lot about the Indigenous peoples of New England at that time. He writes about flora and the fauna and what goods might be available to sell back in England. But at the end, he also is quite critical of the Puritans, and I think this is probably the part that’s most interesting. He is a colonist as well, but he has a totally different idea of what the colonies should look like, and so he criticizes them pretty heavily, and subsequently they ban his book and they exile him.

Klimek: So who was Thomas Morton?

Connolly: He was a colonist. He had ambitions to go to the New World, as many did in that day, and wanted to maybe establish a colony of his own. He also, I think, had a huge personality that may have been a turnoff to a lot of people, including the Puritans. He liked to party, it seemed—probably the most famous thing about Thomas Morton was that he did this pagan ritual where he had a maypole and he invited the Native Americans and they all kind of danced around and drank and whatever. And the Puritans put a stop to that. They arrested him and took down the maypole. And that’s sort of the scene that endures about Thomas Morton.

Klimek: We’ve all seen Footloose , we know what happens when you try to bring dancing to a religious community. What does he say about the Puritans that makes them want to suppress the book?

Connolly: He’s pretty critical of their strict society, and he’s also pretty pointed about how he sees their treatment of Native Americans. He sees it as pretty unjust. He imagined a society where they were a bit more intermingled and the Native Americans were part of the colonist society. To be fair, again, he’s a colonist as well, so you can argue about how good he really was. But they probably would have seen just a threat to their existence. They were trying to survive; they didn’t know the terrain as well. And someone like Thomas Morton comes along, and he is more friendly with the Native Americans. He actually trades guns to them, and then he criticizes the Puritan approach. The whole idea, I think, to them is just a threat to their survival. He was exiled after he wrote the book, but he came back, so they put him on an island somewhere and Native Americans helped him get off. And he ended up coming back and was exiled a second time. And so this is a guy who just seems not to go away.

Klimek: Is there anything more that we know about Morton prior to his arrival in North America?

Connolly: Yeah, we know he arrives, I believe it’s sometime in the 1620s. He wants to revoke the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter and establish his own colony, and he doesn’t quite succeed in that. He does manage to establish a colony of his own that he calls Merrymount. I don’t think it lasted for very long, but people have described as sort of like a utopia. So it was supposedly more egalitarian, with Native Americans and colonists combining religious and spiritual beliefs of everyone. Didn’t necessarily have one main leader, but again, he was up against the Puritan society.

Klimek: Do you know where the idea of actually banning the book came from? Were the Puritans already in the habit of suppressing other activities or media, or was this truly new?

Connolly: I think there’s not a ton of information on what are all the books they banned, but we do know that they were just pretty strict in general. There was an environment of suppression. As one of my sources told me, it’s likely that they just didn’t allow a lot in to begin with. So they didn’t have to ban it, they just didn’t print it and they didn’t allow it in. It’s not like today where we have social media and things, and media is just much more accessible. Back then it was just like: Our printing press is not going to print that. So they probably destroyed copies that they had. To this day, I think of the original printings, I think there’s fewer than 30 left.

Klimek: Wow.

Connolly: Yeah. I’m not entirely sure if they burned them or whatever, but I think they probably destroyed.

Klimek: Is there anything just about the very idea of colonization that we can take away from this?

Connolly: Yeah, definitely. I think probably the biggest takeaway is that this time was pretty contested. It wasn’t just one group of people who came over and had an idea and more or less succeeded. It wasn’t necessarily going to work out that way. And there were a lot of people who kind of disagreed on how the colonies should be. And I think that part of it is what’s gotten lost in history. We may tell a very different story about Thanksgiving or the founding of the United States. Had things gone differently, had someone like Thomas Morton had more success or the Puritans decided not to stay, it wasn’t the inevitable story that we often tell today.

Klimek: So how does this connect to our prized idea of free speech? Is there any connection we can make there between this episode and this lasting part of our national identity?

Connolly: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it shows that while we say free speech was something, as you say, a bedrock or a foundation of this country, it sort of shows that it wasn’t and still isn’t. There’s always people who disagree with the status quo. And throughout history, you see examples of book bans and other kinds of censorship, and they really tell us about what people are afraid of. For this story, I spoke to Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty, who’s the director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, and she compared it to even James Baldwin. People have also banned him, and she says it’s not just as a Black man, as a gay man. And she said, “A lot of it seems to come down to these kind of ethnicity and identity questions.” And so while Morton was an English guy, he was seen as friendly with the Native Americans, and his book was banned. As she said, it’s sort of a bit of a through line through these last 400 years.

Klimek: So where has this 400-year-old book echoed in the subsequent centuries? Where might we have encountered it or discussion of it?

Connolly: Yeah. This is an interesting journey of the book. The book does survive, and so for a while, Morton is just kind of made fun of. He’s seen as sort of like a comic foil sometimes in other writings; not much is made of his book. But in the 1800s, Nathaniel Hawthorne actually writes a short story about him and the maypole, and he actually paints Thomas Morton in a better light. And that becomes a turning point, not just for Morton and his legacy, but also for the book. And in the same century, John Adams’ family and his descendants, a former president, they had a copy of this book, and they’re interested in the history of early America. And they’ve also become interested in the book, less because they care about Morton and more because there’s information in there that’s maybe not found elsewhere, and they want to know: What were the colonies like?

And as I said, a lot of this book is kind of an ethnography, so it does provide a lot of historical information. It gets a bit more prestige from that. And then if we go until the 1900s, it’s picked up again, this time by the beatnik crowd. They saw this Thomas Morton as a rebel against the Puritans, and these are people who are rebels against the current authority. It’s pretty divorced from the context of the time, but he becomes an anti-authoritarian symbol all the way in 2001. Philip Roth actually writes about Morton, and it sort of comes from the same spirit as the beatniks, I think. I think he writes that it should be his face on Mount Rushmore and not the others. And so it’s seeing him as anti-authoritarian, better than our Puritan founders. We’ve taken a completely different view in the last 50 years of colonization, right? It’s not so rosy anymore, and so Morton becomes a symbol of that.

Klimek: Thank you for this conversation.

Connolly: Thank you so much.

Carla Hayden: There’s always been an effort to restrict what certain people could read. To open up your mind to different ideas is somewhat threatening at different points in history for different groups.

Klimek: Dr. Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress from the top of the episode, told us that New English Canaan shares a legacy with one of the world’s most popular texts: the Bible. Slave holders in early America withheld access to the Bible, not wanting enslaved people to read, for instance, the story of the Exodus, when Moses led enslaved people to freedom.

Hayden: A book that has those kind of pesky types of things, like, “ Let my people go .” Well, I’ve had experience with looking into that, and because I’m African American and also a librarian. So that aspect of restricting the ability to read and then what slaves read. You couldn’t just look at Frederick Douglass’ autobiography when he talks, when his “master” found out that his “mistress” was teaching him to read. He said, “If you let him read, he’ll be restless. He won’t be satisfied with his condition.” And so when you think about some of the things, Exodus, all of the things that are in the Bible that might negate what a person has experienced as a slave, and that they would get strength from reading and inspiration. People that wanted to keep those peculiar institutions in place would not want the people who were enslaved to be inspired and to gain any strength from reading, so it had to be restricted.

Klimek: How are the book bans that we’re seeing today different from the ones that were happening earlier in your career?

Hayden: They seem to be more targeted to certain types of materials. Before, we’ve had attempts at banning books or restricting access to books that covered a wide range, from Harry Potter to Huckleberry Finn . Even in the history of libraries, comic books weren’t looked upon kindly. And even before that, when they called them “romance novels” or things in the 1890s, you wouldn’t have that type of thing, because they thought that would give women kind of strange ideas. Romance, huh, that’s not what marriage is about. So there’ve been all of these types of things.

And what’s happening now, that seems to be very targeted to certain types of materials. It’s not as broad-based, and it seems to be tied to broader cultural and political movements and much more organized than it was before. It’s an interesting time with efforts at censorship. There are groups that don’t want, for instance, your children to know about or even think that they are part of, because you are objecting to a particular culture or lifestyle.

One that really struck home for me in terms of my own family, my mom talks about when she was growing up, when they went to school, they didn’t have any African American history. She’s almost 92 now, and the only time African Americans were mentioned was during the part of the curriculum that talked about slavery. And the African American children wanted to stay home, because that was the only time that people that looked like them or their ancestors were mentioned. And so not teaching African American history or the reason why Rosa Parks had the incident on the bus was because of racism. And that, by bringing that point out, would make a young person of today feel badly that their ancestors had been the oppressors was very ironic for my mom as she’s hearing all of this now. Because, she said, “Well, people didn’t care what we felt when that history was being taught.”

Klimek: Do people understand the books that they want to ban?

Hayden: Some people that challenge a book haven’t even read it, and that’s what’s fascinating. They might actually like it if they read it, or they might realize, “Oh, there’s something good about this.” So it’s easier, I would suppose, to not invest in reading a book but protesting what the book is about. And hearing what the book is about or what the flap on the side says it’s about, or the review says it’s about, than sitting down and reading 256 pages yourself. And seeing how you feel after you read it, that’s a commitment.

Klimek: Yeah. Why do people keep trying this?

Hayden: I think people might not realize the power of the word telling the story, having access. Frederick Douglass famously said, “Once you learn to read, you’ll be forever free.” The power of reading. Early on, people understood slaves wanted to learn how to read. They knew that there was something in those books that people didn’t want them to have.

Klimek: What about now? What’s the broad motivation, you think, to withhold certain kinds of information from certain people?

Hayden: Information can be empowering. “Knowledge is power”—that’s another phrase that you hear quite a bit, because if you understand something or you understand how things came to be, it’s harder for other people to tell you something different. And then you might be able to challenge them and challenge, “No, this is how it happened. It wasn’t because, for instance, people were inferior or anything like that, or it wasn’t this, it was that. Here’s what really happened. Here’s a fact. Here’s something that is true misinformation.” There’s a lot of talk about that. Now, I’m going to teach you in library school that you look at the source, who’s telling you this? What’s an authoritative source of information?

Klimek: And one of the professions most affected by all of this are librarians. How is this affecting librarians across the country?

Hayden: Well, librarians, we have mugs and T-shirts that say, “Librarians, the original search engines.” So we’ve been involved with information and the internet since it’s really been widely available, because that was another way for us to provide information to people, health information, all types of things. And so librarians have been at the forefront of looking at: What are some of the safeguards? How can we be better prepared to be those guides on the side when they’re surfing? People still use public libraries, for instance, as one of their major sources of health information.

Klimek: Yeah, that’s something that I hadn’t thought of, this idea that yes, now anyone with internet access has access to all of this information of widely varying quality. But the librarians can still help us sort the legitimate stuff from the cynical and fabricated stuff. That media literacy seems critical.

Hayden: “Information literacy” is the term that we use, and it’s really that same thing, but also in this new world. And that’s going to be even more of an aspect when you think about artificial intelligence.

Klimek: Oh, boy.

Hayden: People are worried about that. So that’s a whole new area to think about. So it’s an exciting time, though, to be in the library profession. So I’m recruiting on your broadcast here.

Klimek: OK, yes. Are there any current news stories or current bans or current books or anything that you’re watching now as kind of an indicator of where this is going to go?

Hayden: The books about sexual identity have seemed to be targeted the most recently. And that is concerning in many ways, because when you think about those young adults or young people who are grappling with all types of things in their lives, let’s say. And to be able to have access to materials that now are being produced, because just like Judy Blume was at the forefront with certain things that she talked about, and it was like, “Oh my gosh, thank you.” Here’s a book you can give a young person about that.

Especially librarians, we knew that sometimes we were the only adults in some of the young people’s lives that could suss out a little bit or try this or think about this or that. We were these trusted people in young people’s lives, too. When I think about being a young adult librarian in the ’70s like I was, I would’ve loved to have had a lot of the materials that are available now. Just so many things that just … There’s a book about everything, just every situation, just about. A children’s book, and that’s so helpful. I’ve had parents that I even work with, it just makes such a difference when you can share a book with a young person.

Klimek: What would you say to parents who are living in areas or in school districts where book banning is happening in a very aggressive way? And they want their kids to have full access to the full spectrum of information, and how do they navigate that hurdle?

Hayden: Different people have different levels of being comfortable with going to a school board meeting or going to a library board meeting. But it certainly is helpful when you have other voices at those meetings, when these types of things are being discussed, to say, “I want my child to read freely.” Or, “I want to be able to decide with my child and in my household what my child could read. And I want my tax dollars to offer a broad range.” And so being able to be part of the discussion helps the school librarians and the public librarians, when you say that it’s not just one point of view, we need that.

Klimek: Carla, this has been a lovely, revealing conversation. Thank you so much.

Hayden: Well, thank you.

Klimek: To read Colleen Connolly’s article about New English Canaan , go to SmithsonianMag.com . We also have a link to it in our show notes, as well as more information about Banned Books Week . We like to end each episode with a dinner party fact—this is a little extra bite of info to pull out when the conversation turns as cold as leftover pizza. This week’s dinner party fact is about a type of bean, but not one that you’d eat.

Tracy Scott Forson: I’m Tracy Scott Forson, a senior editor with Smithsonian magazine, and here’s my dinner party fact. Chicago’s most famous example of public art, “ The Bean ,” isn’t officially called that at all. Its real name is Cloud Gate , and the British artist behind it, Anish Kapoor, gave it that name because the sculpture’s mirrored surface reflects the sky. We profile Kapoor’s career as a groundbreaking artist and get a sneak peek at his newest paintings in our November issue. Oh, and don’t worry, Kapoor admitted that he himself has taken to calling his Chicago attraction “The Bean” too.

Klimek: “There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Ry Dorsey, Edwin Ochoa and Josie Holtzman. Executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music.

I’m Chris Klimek, thanks for listening.

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Report: Last year ended with a surge in book bans

Elizabeth Blair

Cumulative book bans in the United States, July 1, 2021 - December 31, 2023. See the full PEN America report here. PEN America hide caption

Cumulative book bans in the United States, July 1, 2021 - December 31, 2023. See the full PEN America report here.

PEN America says there was an "unprecedented" surge in book bans during the latter half of 2023, according to a new report.

The free expression group says that from July-December of last year, it recorded 4,349 instances of book bans across 23 states and 52 public school districts. The report says more books were banned in those six months than in the 12 months of the 2022-2023 school year.

Adults have a lot to say about book bans — but what about kids?

PEN America says it draws its information on bans from "publicly available data on district or school websites, news sources, public records requests, and school board minutes."

Among the key takeaways:

• The vast majority of school book bans occurred in Florida, with 3,135 bans across 11 of the state's school districts. A spokesperson with Florida's Department of Education declined NPR's request for comment.
• Book bans are often instigated by a small number of people. Challenges from one parent lead to a temporary banning of 444 books in a school district in Wisconsin.
• Those who ban books often cite "obscenity law and hyperbolic rhetoric about 'porn in schools' to justify banning books about sexual violence and LGBTQ+ topics (and in particular, trans identities)," the report says.
• There is a similar surge in resistance against the bans, says the report. Authors, students and others are "fighting back in creative and powerful ways."

Who's doing the banning?

A study by The Washington Post found that in 2021-2022, "Just 11 people were responsible for filing 60 percent" of book challenges.

At a press conference today, free expression advocates from around the country that joined PEN America to discuss bans talked about the seemingly-outsized power of a small, but vocal, group.

American Library Association report says book challenges soared in 2023

High school senior Quinlen Schachle, the president of the Alaska Association of Student Governments, said when he attends school board meetings, "It's, like, [the same] one adult that comes up every day and challenges a new book. It is not a concerned a group of parents coming in droves to these meetings."

Laney Hawes, Co-Director of the Texas Freedom to Read Project said books are often banned because of "a handful of lists that are being circulated to different school districts" and not because of "a parent whose child finds the book and they have a problem with it."

To fight so-called book bans, some states are threatening to withhold funding

PEN America defines a book ban as "any action taken against a book based on its content...that leads to a previously accessible book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."

The conservative American Enterprise Institute took exception to PEN America's April 2022 banned books report . In a report for the Education Freedom Institute, AEI said it found that "almost three-quarters of the books that PEN listed as banned were still available in school libraries in the same districts from which PEN claimed they had been banned."

You can read PEN America's full report here .

This story was edited by Jennifer Vanasco.

Book bans are on the rise. What are the most banned books and why?

Banned books are not new, but they have gained new relevance in an escalating culture war that puts books centering racism, sexuality and gender identity at risk in public schools and libraries.

A dramatic uptick in challenged books over the past few years, an escalation of censorship tactics, and the coordinated harassment of teachers and librarians has regularly put book banning efforts in news headlines.

Would-be book banners argue that readers can still purchase books they can no longer access through public libraries, but that is only true for those with the financial resources to do so. For many, particularly children and young adults, schools and public libraries are the only means to access literature. 

What is a book ban?

When a book is successfully “banned,” that means a book has been removed from school curriculums and/or public libraries because a person or group has objected to its content.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

An attempt to get a book removed is called a challenge. Most public schools and libraries have boards made up of elected officials (or people appointed by elected officials) who have the power to remove books from the schools and libraries they oversee.

Why it matters: A book ban is significant because it restricts others’ access to books, and the ideas contained within those books, based on another person’s often ideologically or politically motivated objection. 

Are book bans on the rise in the U.S.?

Yes. The American Library Association (ALA) keeps track of challenges and bans across the country, and the most recent data is alarming.

In 2022, the ALA recorded more than 1,200 challenges of more than 2,500 different books , nearly double the then-record total from 2021 and by far the most since the ALA began keeping data 20 years ago.

The actual numbers are likely much higher: Some challenges are never reported by libraries, and books preemptively pulled by librarians out of fear for their jobs are not included. 

What are the most banned books? 

A recent analysis by PEN America found that many challenged books focus on communities of color, the history of racism in America and LGBTQ characters. In fact, one in three books restricted by school districts in the past year featured LGBTQ themes or characters. 

Here are the 13 most challenged books  of 2022, according to the ALA: 

• "Gender Queer," by Maia Kobabe
• "All Boys Aren't Blue," by George M. Johnson
• "The Bluest Eye," by Toni Morrison
• "Flamer," by Mike Curato
• "Looking for Alaska," by John Green
• "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," by Stephen Chbosky
• "Lawn Boy," by Jonathan Evison
• "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," by Sherman Alexie
• "Out of Darkness," by Ashley Hope Pérez
• "A Court of Mist and Fury," by Sarah J. Maas
• "Crank," by Ellen Hopkins
• "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," by Jesse Andrews
• "This Book Is Gay," by Juno Dawson

Many books that were historically banned ended up becoming literary classics that are still taught in modern classrooms. Accordingly to the ALA,  frequently banned classics include:

• " To Kill a Mockingbird ," by Harper Lee
• " The Catcher in the Rye ," by JD Salinger
• " The Grapes of Wrath ," by John Steinbeck
• " The Color Purple ," by Alice Walker
• " 1984 ," by George Orwell
• " Brave New World ," by Aldous Huxley
• " Native Son ," by Richard Wright
• " Slaughterhouse-Five ," by Kurt Vonnegut
• " A Separate Peace ," by John Knowles
• " The Lord of the Flies ," by William Golding

Who bans books in the U.S.?

Book banning made major headlines last year  when the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee voted 10-0 to remove Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir “Maus,” about his parents’ experience of the holocaust, from its curriculum. 

Since then, there’s been a largely conservative push to remove certain titles from schools and libraries, in some cases with politicians leading the charge, including:

Glenn Youngkin:  During his successful run for Virginia governor last fall, the Republican candidate ran a controversial ad featuring a mother who objected to her teenage son being assigned Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in English class. In April, now Governor Youngkin signed a bill requiring Virginia schools to notify parents when their children are assigned books that contain sexually explicit content. 

Henry McMaster: The Republican South Carolina governor supported a school board's decision to remove "Gender Queer,” calling the book “obscene.”

Ron DeSantis: The Republican Florida governor also criticized “Gender Queer” and this year signed into law a bill requiring schools to make all books and materials more transparent so parents can “blow the whistle.”

What’s being done to combat book banning?

Let America Read: Celebrities including Julia Roberts, Selma Blair and Andy Cohen joined forces with the CAA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Creative Artists Agency, and the Campaign for Our Shared Future for the Let America Read campaign to raise awareness on the issue of book banning. In an Instagram post highlighting frequently challenged books by Black Authors, TV mega producer Shonda Rhimes wrote, "These books are so important for a multitude of reasons. Books like these are now banned in multiple states simply because they deal with the lives of Black families in America. These stories are necessary so that kids can see themselves and to be able to embrace the differences in others. Support our children’s freedom to learn and let America read."

American Library Association:  Every year, the ALA and libraries across the country celebrate Banned Books Week . This year’s Banned Books Week runs Oct. 1-7 . 

Foundation 451:  A fundraiser in Florida to buy challenged books and distribute them to students spawned thousands in donations and has morphed into a nonprofit organization . The organization has distributed books at about a dozen events, setting up tables at festivals, churches and local businesses.

Nashville Public Library: This Southern library protested banned books this year with a limited edition library card with the special message: "I read banned books." The bright yellow cards are part of the library's Freedom to Read campaign celebrating the "right to read."   

Margaret Atwood:  Author of the frequently banned dystopian feminist novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” promoted the auction of a specially commissioned unburnable edition of her book made of Cinefoil by unsuccessfully attempting to incinerate a prototype with a flamethrower. The stunt brought in $130,000, with proceeds going to PEN America.

Banned books in the news

• Illinois law will penalize libraries that ban books : Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law a bill that he says will make Illinois the first state in the nation to outlaw book bans. Illinois public libraries that restrict or ban materials because of “partisan or doctrinal” disapproval will be ineligible for state funding as of Jan. 1, 2024, when the new law goes into effect.
• Georgia school’s book bans may break civil rights law : The U.S. Department of Education has found that suburban Atlanta Forsyth County school district's decision to remove some books from its libraries may have created a hostile environment that violated federal laws against race and sex discrimination. The legal intervention by the department's Office of Civil Rights could curb efforts to ban books in other public school districts nationwide, especially when bans are focused on books that include content about LGBTQ and nonwhite people. Forsyth County in January 2022 removed eight books, including Toni Morrison's “The Bluest Eye,” but allowed seven to return after further consideration. It excluded only “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir about growing up gay and Black by George M. Johnson.
• Florida governor goes to war with education : Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida passed a law requiring all books available to children to be approved by a "district employee holding a valid educational media specialist certificate." The law  bars any content deemed "pornographic" or "not suited to student needs," a classification so broad some teachers began  removing books  early as a precaution against legal action. In response, the Florida teacher's union joined other groups in  filing a lawsuit  against the state Department of Education alleging  the law is overreaching  and will lead to censorship.

Version of 'Anne Frank' removed from Florida high school : An illustrated adaptation of "The Diary of Anne Frank" was removed from the Vero Beach High School library after a parent group complained the book minimalizes the Holocaust and shows the young girl's thoughts about other female bodies.

Banned book attempts hit record high in 2022: The American Library Association (ALA) released its latest data on book banning attempts, which nearly doubled over last year's then-record highs. "I've never seen anything like this," says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom. "The last two years have been exhausting, frightening, outrage inducing."

James Patterson's responds to book removal :  Martin County, Florida school district officials removed Patterson's young adult series "Maximum Ride" from its elementary school library. Patterson  tweeted  about the incident, urging fans who found "mindless book banning troubling or confusing" to write to Florida governor DeSantis, who has been aggressively waging the culture war. "If you are going to ban this book, then no kids under 12 should go to any Marvel movies," Patterson said in an interview .

House Republicans introduce "Parents Bill of Rights" :  Republicans across the country have focused on educational issues as they lay the groundwork for the 2024 presidential and congressional elections, from DeSantis blocking a high school course on Black history to bills restricting LGBTQ education. The Parents Bill of Rights would require all curriculums to be made public, including any materials in a school library or classroom, and follows outcries from parents who are unhappy that lessons and books about racism, sexual orientation and gender are being taught in schools. 

"Moms for Liberty" seeks to restrict books in Iowa :  Five Iowa moms, all members of the conservative "Moms for Liberty" group, made their case to Iowa lawmakers in February about their efforts to remove or limit "inappropriate" books in schools. At a Moms for Liberty event, Gov. Kim Reynolds promised to end "indoctrination" in public schools and to back legislation that would give parents more oversight into which books are made available to students.

Education Department investigates removal of LGBTQ books from Texas schools :  The removal of LGBTQ-themed books from the library of the Granbury, Texas, school district is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's civil rights division following a complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Contributing: Associated Press.

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Watch CBS News

The 50 most banned books in America

By Jennifer Martin

November 10, 2022 / 7:38 PM EST / CBS News

During the 2021-2022 school year, more than 1,600 books were banned from school libraries . The bans affected 138 school districts in 32 states, according to a report from PEN America , an organization dedicated to protecting free expression in literature. 

And the number of bans are only increasing yearly. 

Texas and Florida  lead the nation in book bans  — a revelation that recently spurred Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot to call her city a " book sanctuary ." 

But what are the most commonly banned books in America, and why are they considered controversial? Here are the 50 most commonly banned books in America from the 2021-2022 school year, with data supplied by PEN America.

50. "And Tango Makes Three," by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

The children's book is based on the real-life story of two male chinstrap penguins, Roy and Silo, who formed a bond at the Central Park Zoo in New York City. After zookeepers saw the pair trying to hatch a rock as if it were an egg, they gave the penguin couple their own egg. Roy and Silo subsequently raised the chick, Tango, as their own.

This book came out in 2005, and was subject to five bans during the 2021-2022 school year.

PEN America states  that "the banning of a single book title could mean anywhere from one to hundreds of copies are pulled from libraries or classrooms in a school district." The data doesn't consider duplicate bans per district in its unique title tally, but each separate ban is counted in the overall rankings.

49. "Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You," by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds

This children's book garnered controversy for its frank portrayals of racism.

Senator Ted Cruz held up a copy of the book during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in April 2022 as he questioned her about her views of critical race theory. 

"Stamped" has found itself subject to five book bannings during the last school year.

48. "The Infinite Moment of Us," by Lauren Myracle

Myracle's young-adult novel discusses love and sex among teenagers. It was a target of five book bans in the previous school year.

She is seen here at the premiere of "Let it Snow," a film adaptation of a novel of the same name.

47. "Two Boys Kissing," by David Levithan

The book was released in 2013 and was subject to five bans during the 2021-2022 school year. 

The story, inspired by real-life events, is about two boys who set out to break a world record by kissing for 32 hours straight.

46. "How to Be an Antiracist," by Ibram X. Kendi

The nonfiction book by Ibram X. Kendi helped popularize the term "antiracist" when came out in 2019. It was on school ban lists five times over the previous school year. 

It's part memoir and part social commentary on racism and ethnicity.

45. "I Am Jazz," by Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel

As soon as Jazz Jennings could speak, she told her parents that she was a girl, despite having been assigned male at birth. She became a spokesperson for trans children and co-wrote a book entitled "I Am Jazz" about her experience. It was banned on five separate occasions during the past school year.

She's pictured here with parents Greg and Jeanette along with brother Sanders at the GLAAD Media Awards in 2019. 

44. "We Are the Ants," by Shaun David Hutchinson

The science fiction novel follows Henry, whose boyfriend has died by suicide. 

"We Are the Ants" was subjected to five book bans in the 2021-2022 school year, despite having been on multiple "best of" lists. 

43. "Killing Mr. Griffin," by Lois Duncan

This suspense novel, published in 1978, is about teenagers kidnapping and murdering their strict teacher. These themes caused the book to go through five bans over the course of the previous school year.

Duncan, pictured here, was credited with helping to pioneer horror and suspense for teens.

42. "Lucky," by Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold, known for her more famous best-seller "The Lovely Bones," saw her memoir "Lucky" pulled from school bookshelves six times in the 2021-2022 school year because of a graphic depiction of the rape she survived in college.

Outside of the content of the book itself, there was further controversy after Anthony Broadwater, the man who was convicted and imprisoned for Sebold's rape for 16 years, was exonerated. Sebold has  publicly apologized for having mistakenly identified the wrong man as her attacker. 

The book is no longer being distributed, and Sebold (seen here autographing a book) is rewriting the memoir.

41. "The Truth About Alice," by Jennifer Mathieu

"The Truth About Alice" discusses slut-shaming among teenagers. The work was part of six book bans in the previous school year.

The book was released in 2014.

40. "Real Live Boyfriends: Yes. Boyfriends, Plural. If My Life Weren't Complicated, I Wouldn't Be Ruby Oliver," by E. Lockhart

The fourth novel of author E. Lockhart's "Ruby Oliver" quartet is the most controversial, thanks to sexual content and slut-shaming, and was part of school book bans six times in the 2021-2022 school year.

Released in 2010, the long-titled book details common issues teenagers face. 

39. "Almost Perfect," by Brian Katcher

An all-American high-schooler named Logan develops a crush on a trans teen named Sage.

Many among the top 50 banned books deal with issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, including this one, which was part of book bans six times in the 2021-2022 school year alone.

38. "Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen," by Jazz Jennings

Jazz Jennings' follow-up book to "I Am Jazz" was "Being Jazz," in which she talked about what her life as a trans teen was like. The book was banned six different times from 2021-2022. 

Here's Jazz Jennings taking on the role of Grand Marshal at the 2016 Pride March in New York City.

37. "Speak," by Laurie Halse Anderson

A girl named Melinda is raped, calls the police, and is then ostracized, causing her to develop selective mutism. The story was based on Anderson's own life.

It was the fourth most-banned book in the United States in 2020, and removed from classrooms and libraries in schools six separate times between 2021-2022. Anderson is seen here attending the National Book Awards in 2008.

36. "Dear Martin," by Nic Stone

A Black high school student who suffers a dangerous encounter with white police officers writes to the late Martin Luther King, Jr., asking him what he would do. 

Stone stated she began writing the 2017 book as a response to the deaths of Jordan Davis and Michael Brown . It received seven bans in schools in the past year. She is seen here speaking at the Drum Major for Justice Luncheon in 2020.

35. "The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives," by Dashka Slater

Two teenagers — one White and transgender, the other a Black high-school student named Richard with a tragic past — ride the same bus home each day. 

Due to frank discussions about gender identity, the criminal justice system, and race-based content, the book was part of seven bans in classrooms or libraries over the past school year.

34. "Sold," by Patricia McCormick

A girl from Nepal is sold into sexual slavery. A film based on the novel was released in 2014. Due to depictions of violent sexual content, the book was banned on seven different occasions in the 2021-2022 school year.

McCormick is seen here holding one of her books.

33. "A Court of Mist and Fury," by Sarah J. Maas

"A Court of Mist and Fury" is the second in Sarah J. Maas' "A Court of Thorns and Roses" fantasy series. Due to its sexual content, the book found itself subject to seven book bans over the past school year. 

It's also notable for being one of the books that spurred Virginia state legislator Tim Anderson to sue Barnes & Noble  in hopes of stopping sales of the book. The case was later tossed out.

32. "Monday's Not Coming," by Tiffany D. Jackson

A Black teenage girl goes missing — and her disappearance is never investigated. The book is based on real-life missing Black girls who fail to receive attention from media or police.

Due to its intense discussions about racism, justice and poverty, the book, which was released in 2018, has been pulled from classroom or school library shelves seven times in the past school year.

31. "It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health," by Robie Harris

Robie Harris' frank children's book about puberty and sex was first published in 1994. It had scientifically accurate information and pictures, which caused a lot of uproar when it was initially published. The book continues to receive regular publishing updates to reflect new information. It was on school ban lists seven times in the 2021-2022 school year.

Some parents appreciate the book. Here, mother Stephanie Baptist reads it to her 8-year-old daughter; the book is part of her daughter's school curriculum in Toronto.

30. "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 book, which was turned into a major film in 2012, is one of the most influential of the 21st century, but that hasn't stopped it from getting banned frequently from school libraries — including in seven instances in the past school year alone.

The book deals with themes of death, trauma, and grief in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

29. "More Happy Than Not," by Adam Silvera

The book "More Happy Than Not" deals with LGBTQ themes as well as suicide, depression, and teen pregnancy. Because of this, it was banned in schools on eight separate instances in the 2021-2022 school year.

Here, author Adam Silvera speaks onstage at the Audie Awards Gala in March 2020.

28. "Tricks," by Ellen Hopkins

Ellen Hopkins is known for her gritty, realistic fiction, and her book "Tricks" is no different. It follows the paths of five teenagers and deals with drug usage and sexually explicit content.

The book was published in 2009, and has regularly shown up on banned lists in school districts since then. It was subject to book bans eight times in the past school year.

27. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," by Stephen Chbosky

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" was first published in 1999. The book was considered somewhat controversial for how it portrayed sexuality, drug use, and suicidal content. It was part of book bans eight times during the 2021-2022 school year.

Chbosky, who based the book on some aspects of his life, adapted the novel for film in 2012. He's seen here at the premiere.

26. "All American Boys," by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

Jason Reynolds (pictured here) and Brendan Kiely were sharing a hotel room when they heard that George Zimmerman had been acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin. They shared their frustrations and eventually decided to write a book together.

That book talks about two Black boys navigating hurdles of police brutality and racism while growing up in poverty. Because of its explicit racial content and depiction of law enforcement, the book was subject to nine school bans during the 2021-2022 year.

25. "Nineteen Minutes," by Jodi Picoult

Picoult's 2007 novel "Nineteen Minutes" tells the unfolding tale of a school shooting. 

The graphic depictions of the shootings have made the book controversial, and there were nine instances of it being pulled from classroom or school library bookshelves in the past school year.

24. "The Breakaways," by Cathy G. Johnson

This graphic novel tells the story of a girls' soccer team.

School districts have banned it for its depiction of trans kids, sexual content, and discussion of "Black Lives Matter." It was part of nine book bans in the 2021-2022 school year.

23. "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic," by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel's narrative, told through comic-style illustrations, served as a memoir of her life growing up with a closeted gay father; she herself come out as a lesbian after his death.

It was adapted as a musical in 2013.

22. "The Handmaid's Tale," by Margaret Atwood

"The Handmaid's Tale" shows the dystopian near-future of a patriarchal, totalitarian, theocratic society. The book, originally published in 1985, is now a successful television series. It is still controversial, and was removed from classroom and library bookshelves nine times over 2021-2022.

A special "unburnable" version of Margaret Atwood's famous book, seen here, was auctioned off in June 2022 to support PEN America in its goal to fight censorship.

21. "Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts)," by L. C. Rosen

"Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts)" is a book about a sexually active queer teen who starts a sex column at his school. Rosen specializes in writing content for LGBTQ teens.

Due to the content of sexual nature — despite the fact that there are no sex scenes in the book — there were 10 book bans for it over the past school year. 

20. "Flamer," by Mike Curato

This 2020 book from Mike Curato is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel based on his experience growing up as a gay Catholic boy, and struggling to suppress his feelings and act more masculine in front of other boys.

Some people have criticized the book's discussions of LGBTQ content, but it won a Lambda Literary Award in 2021 — while also being banned by schools on 10 different occasions.

19. "Drama: A Graphic Novel," by Raina Telgemeier

Raina Telgemeier stands here in front of a display of her books. "Drama: A Graphic Novel" tells the story of a middle-school girl navigating crushes and friendship.

Due to the fact that it portrays a same-sex crush, it was on ban lists 11 times in the 2021-2022 school year.

18. "This One Summer," by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

Two teen girls start to get interested in boys and learn more about the adults around them.

Based on some sexual content and mental-health issues, as well as the depiction of a pregnant teenager, there were 11 separate school bans of the graphic novel in the past school year.

17. "Beloved," by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's 1987 novel was inspired by a tragic real-life story of a person fleeing slavery in Kentucky in the 1850s, and the dramatic choices she made when she was caught.

Its violent and graphic scenes were cited as reasons why it was subjected to 11 book bans in schools in the past year. Morrison, a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, seen here, died in 2019.

16. "Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out," by Susan Kuklin

Kuklin's story chronicles six real-life trans teens and young adults. Kuklin interviewed each of them before, during, and after transition, and formed all of the interviews into one cohesive narrative.

The book was accused of being "anti-family" and "sexually explicit" and has regularly been on banned book lists since its release. In the 2021-2022 school year, it was pulled from classroom or school library bookshelves 11 times.

15. "Looking For Alaska," by John Green

Author John Green (seen here at the premiere of the film adaptation of "Looking for Alaska") is known for his young-adult novels, which have been well received by critics and fans. "Looking for Alaska" is considered his most controversial — it has been banned 11 times in schools since 2021. 

Parents were concerned about the profanity and sexually explicit scenes in the book, which follows a group of friends dealing with the death of one of their own.

14. "Melissa (George)," by Alex Gino

The book depicts a fourth-grade trans girl trying to get her parents to understand her transition by playing Charlotte in a "Charlotte's Web" school play, even though she is perceived as a boy. The story is often controversial in conservative schools. 

In the 2021-2022 school year, it was part of classroom and library book bans 11 times.

13. "This Book is Gay," by Juno Dawson

This informative nonfiction book talks about being gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, intersex, asexual, queer, or even just being curious. It includes stories, interviews, and more from kids, teens, and adults across the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Dawson considers it a manual for life as an LGBTQ person.

Due to what parents considered "sexually explicit" content, the book was yanked from classrooms and school libraries 11 times over the past school year.

12. "l8r, g8r," by Lauren Myracle

A 2000s era young-adult series by Lauren Myracle (seen here) is written entirely as instant messages. The first two, "ttyl" and "ttfn," aren't considered as controversial.

But 2007's "l8r, g8r" was banned due to sexual content and profanity. The use of emojis and internet shorthand are prevalent throughout the novel.

11. "The Kite Runner," by Khaled Hosseini

The story is about two boys growing up in Afghanistan against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion, the exodus of refugees to Pakistan, and the rise of the Taliban. 

It is a controversial novel in Afghanistan, but is also the subject of many book challenges in American school districts. There is a particularly brutal rape scene in the book. It was subjected to 12 separate book bans in schools since 2021. 

Hosseini is seen here at the premiere of the 2007 film adaptation of "The Kite Runner."

10. "Crank," by Ellen Hopkins

A teenager develops a crystal meth addiction. The story was loosely based on Hopkins' own daughter, who also developed an addiction to crystal meth.

Because of the portrayal of addiction, drug usage, and sexual content, it was put on school ban lists 12 times in the 2021-2022 school year.

9. "Thirteen Reasons Why," by Jay Asher

A girl named Hannah leaves behind seven cassette tapes detailing why 13 specific people and events caused her death suicide. The story was inspired by a suicide attempt made by one of Asher's relatives.

The book was published in 2007, but gained new popularity after Netflix released a television series. It has been challenged frequently since its release, and was part of school book bans 12 times over the 2021-2022 school year because of its depiction of teen suicide, sexual assault, and drug and alcohol use.

8. "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," by Jesse Andrews

Two high school friends, Earl and Greg, befriend a girl named Rachel who has acute myelogenous leukemia. 

With its depictions of death, drug use, and sexual content, the book was banned 14 times over the previous school year, which means that the book was removed from school libraries and classroom shelves on 14 separate occasions.

The author, Jesse Andrews, is seen here at the premiere of the film adaptation of "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," which was released in 2015.

7. "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," by Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie's book was subjected to school bans 16 times during the 2021-2022 school year. It was first released in 2007, and has been controversial since then due to its subject matter, which deals with poverty, sexuality, bullying, alcohol usage, profanity and the use of slurs.

The novel is semi-autobiographical, based on the Native American author's life, and won a National Book Award in 2007. 

Alexie is seen here at the Live Wire! Radio Show in 2009.

6. "The Hate U Give," by Angie Thomas

"The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas, seen here in 2019 at the Massachusetts Conference for Women, was released in 2017, and deals with the aftereffects of a Black girl who attends a predominantly white, elite private school.

The movie adaptation premiered in 2018. 

Due to the race-based themes, profanity, and explicit content, the book has been regularly banned since its release. In the 2021-2022 school year, it was removed from school libraries or classrooms 17 times. 

5. "The Lawn Boy," by Jonathan Evison

Jonathan Evison, seen here at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, received death threats over "The Lawn Boy" after it was published in 2018. The semi-autobiographical novel is about a boy facing hardship and learning to overcome it. 

Parents have accused the book of containing "homoerotic content" because a character recalls a same-sex encounter from his youth, and it was ultimately part of 17 different book bans during the 2021-2022 school year.

4. "The Bluest Eye," by Toni Morrison

The impact of this 1970 novel by Toni Morrison has been immense. This 2007 photo shows a dress rehearsal of a stage version of "The Bluest Eye" in San Francisco.

The novel follows a Black girl who believes she is ugly, and would be more beautiful if she only had blue eyes. Its subject matter contains elements of child molestation, sexual assault, drunkenness, racism and incest, all of which got it banned on 22 separate occasions throughout multiple school districts in the past school year.

3. "Out of Darkness," by Ashley Hope Pérez

"Out of Darkness" follows the forbidden love story of a Mexican-American girl and a Black boy in the 1930s. The book was the subject of many parental complaints stemming from sexually explicit content, violence, and portrayal of racism experienced by the main characters. 

Over the 2021-2022 school year, it was yanked from classroom and school library bookshelves 24 times. 

2. "All Boys Aren't Blue," by George M. Johnson

Queer activist George M. Johnson published "All Boys Aren't Blue" in 2020 and described it as a memoir-manifesto. The book is a compilation of essays describing the author's experience growing up as a queer Black kid in New Jersey, and is written specifically for other queer Black kids.

It contains mentions of sex, masturbation, and profanity, making it the No. 2 banned book of the 2021-2022 school year. It was removed from schools 29 different times. 

This photo shows Johnson at the Queerties Awards Celebration in March 2022.

1. "Gender Queer: A Memoir," by Maia Kobabe

The most banned book of the 2021-2022 school year was "Gender Queer: A Memoir" by Maia Kobabe. It was removed from school libraries and/or classroom bookshelves on 41 separate instances, according to PEN America .

Kobabe (right) is seen here being interviewed by Kathleen Breitenbach (left) at an event at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

Kobabe wrote the memoir about a journey through gender identity and sexuality. There are a few explicit illustrations depicting Kobabe's sexual discovery, and many parents and conservative media figures have complained about the book.

Jennifer Martin is an expert on streaming and deals for CBS Essentials. She has a soft spot for foodie culture, beauty and wellness products and all things pop culture. Jennifer lives in Richmond, VA with her family of five, plus a cat, a dog and a frog.

For immediate release | April 8, 2024

ALA kicks off National Library Week revealing the annual list of Top 10 Most Challenged Books and the State of America’s Libraries Report

CHICAGO — The American Library Association (ALA) launched National Library Week with today’s release of its highly anticipated annual list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023 and the State of America’s Libraries Report, which highlights the ways libraries and library workers have taken action to address community needs with innovative and critical services, as well as the challenges brought on by censorship attempts.

The number of unique titles targeted for censorship surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels ever documented by ALA.

“In looking at the titles of the most challenged books from last year, it’s obvious that the pressure groups are targeting books about LGBTQIA+ people and people of color,” said ALA President Emily Drabinski. “At ALA, we are fighting for the freedom to choose what you want to read. Shining a light on the harmful workings of these pressure groups is one of the actions we must take to protect our right to read.”

Below are the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023:

• “ Gender Queer ,” by Maia Kobabe

Reasons: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

• “ All Boys Aren’t Blue ,” by George M. Johnson
• “ This Book is Gay ,” by Juno Dawson

Reasons: LGBTQIA+ content, sex education, claimed to be sexually explicit

• “ The Perks of Being a Wallflower ,” by Stephen Chbosky

Reasons: Claimed to be sexually explicit, LGBTQIA+ content, rape, drugs, profanity

• “ Flamer ,” by Mike Curato
• “ The Bluest Eye ,” by Toni Morrison

Reasons: Rape, incest, claimed to be sexually explicit, EDI content

• (TIE) “ Tricks ,” by Ellen Hopkins

Reasons: Claimed to be sexually explicit, drugs, rape, LGBTQIA+ content

• (TIE) “ Me and Earl and the Dying Girl ,” by Jesse Andrews

Reasons: Claimed to be sexually explicit, profanity

• “ Let's Talk About It ,” by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan

Reasons: Claimed to be sexually explicit, sex education, LGBTQIA+ content

• “ Sold ,” by Patricia McCormick

Reasons: Claimed to be sexually explicit, rape

Top 10 artwork is available for download at: https://bit.ly/ALA-Top10

The Top 10 Books are featured in Unite Against Book Bans’ Book Résumé resource. Launched in February , these résumés support librarians, educators, parents, students, and other community advocates when they defend books from censorship. Created in collaboration with the publishing industry and library workers, each book résumé summarizes the book’s significance and educational value, including a synopsis, reviews from professional journals, awards, accolades and more. Where possible, the book résumés also include information about how a title has been successfully retained in school districts and libraries after a demand to censor the book.

“These are books that contain the ideas, the opinions, and the voices that censors want to silence – stories by and about LGBTQ+ persons and people of color,” said ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom Director Deborah Caldwell-Stone. “Each challenge, each demand to censor these books is an attack on our freedom to read, our right to live the life we choose, and an attack on libraries as community institutions that reflect the rich diversity of our nation. When we tolerate censorship, we risk losing all of this. During National Library Week, we should all take action to protect and preserve libraries and our rights.”

Today is also the second anniversary of Right to Read Day , a day of action launched by Unite Against Book Bans that takes place the Monday of National Library Week. This year’s theme is “Don’t Let Censorship Eclipse Your Freedom to Read,” and anyone who supports the right to read is encouraged to take action today by contacting Congress.

ALA is also pleased to debut the theme for Banned Books Week 2024, “Freed Between the Lines,” which honors the ways in which books bring us freedom and that access to information is worth preserving. Banned Books Week will take place September 22-28, 2024.

About the American Library Association The American Library Association (ALA) is the foremost national organization providing resources to inspire library and information professionals to transform their communities through essential programs and services. For more than 140 years, the ALA has been the trusted voice for academic, public, school, government and special libraries, advocating for the profession and the library’s role in enhancing learning and ensuring access to information for all. For more information, visit www.ala.org .

Raymond Garcia

Communications Specialist

American Library Association

Communications, Marketing & Media Relations Office

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Read the Books That Schools Want to Ban

These 14 titles have been under attack for doing exactly what literature is supposed to do.

Updated at 13:58 p.m. ET on February 3, 2022.

Book banning is back. Texas State Representative Matt Krause recently put more than 800 books on a watch list, many of them dealing with race and LGBTQ issues. Then an Oklahoma state senator filed a bill to ban books that address “sexual perversion,” among other things, from school libraries. The school board of McMinn County, Tennessee, just banned Maus , Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic memoir about the Holocaust. Officials said that they didn’t object to teaching about genocide, but that the book’s profanity, nudity, violence, and depiction of suicide made it “too adult-oriented for use in our schools.”

No one has yet figured out how to depict the Holocaust without ugliness, for the very obvious reason that it was one of the greatest crimes in human history. Maus details the cruelties that Spiegelman’s father witnessed during World War II, including in Auschwitz, as well as the pair’s complicated relationship after the war. Some nudity shows Jews—depicted in the book as mice (their German oppressors are drawn as cats)—stripped naked before their murder. Hiding these images from children purposefully ignores the mechanized gruesomeness of the Holocaust. And Maus ’s removal isn’t a side effect of an otherwise neutral attempt to keep classrooms wholesome. As I wrote in December, getting rid of books that spotlight bigotry is the goal .

Read: This is a shakedown

Books have been the targets of bans in America for more than a century. Maus is not the first, or the last, casualty of an ideology that, in the name of protecting children, leaves them ignorant of the world as it often is. The following 14 books employ difficult, sometimes upsetting imagery to tell complicated stories. That approach has made them some of the most frequently challenged, or outright banned, books in America’s schools; it also makes them perfect examples of what literature is supposed to do. Please consider buying them for the students in your life, and for yourselves.

To Kill a Mockingbird , by Harper Lee

Lee’s 1960 novel about a white lawyer defending a Black man falsely accused of rape in a segregated Alabama town won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. The novel, long used in classrooms as a parable about American racism, has faced various controversies over the decades. Last week, it was removed from a Washington State school district’s required-reading list —although not outright banned—for its racial slurs and for the perception of Atticus Finch as a white savior .

The Handmaid’s Tale , by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s popular dystopian story turns the United States into a Christian theocracy called Gilead, where fertile women are stripped of their name and impregnated against their will. Its sexual violence and criticism of religion have made it ripe for challenges in schools . The original book, its adaptation into a graphic novel, and its sequel, The Testaments, were pulled from circulation, then quickly restored, in a Kansas school district in November.

Read: Slouching towards Gilead

The Bluest Eye , by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye , has shown up multiple times on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books . The classic, which kicked off Morrison’s Nobel Prize–winning career , follows Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl with a tragic family history and a deep desire to have blue eyes. In January, The Bluest Eye was removed from a Missouri school district’s libraries to keep children away from painful scenes of sexual abuse and incest—which in Morrison’s hands become illustrations of the insidious psychological damage that racism deals to her characters.

Fallen Angels , by Walter Dean Myers

This Coretta Scott King Award winner, like many of Myers’s novels, follows a young Black protagonist. In this story, 17-year-old Richie Perry leaves Harlem for Vietnam, where he faces the horror and banality of war. As with Myers’s 1999 book Monster , some have deemed it too violent and profane for students.

Heather Has Two Mommies , by Lesléa Newman

Newman’s 1989 picture book broke ground by depicting exactly what its title says. A young girl named Heather has two lesbian mothers and realizes in the story that her family is different from her schoolmates’ families. She learns why she doesn’t have a father, and that there are many different kinds of families. Newman’s story might feel anodyne today, but the furor it caused in the 1990s, when it was the ninth-most-challenged book of the decade, hasn’t abated: Heather was taken off the shelves in a Pennsylvania school district in December.

Maus , by Art Spiegelman

The truth of the Holocaust is both abstracted and explicitly rendered in the graphic memoir Maus , which was banned in a Tennessee county last month by a unanimous vote . Spiegelman draws his Jewish family and protagonists as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs, but this style doesn’t fully blunt the hideousness of the victims’ suffering. Some of the topics that got the book banned, such as Spiegelman’s mother’s suicide, are essential to rendering the effects of the war. Without them, it would be a different story entirely.

Speak , by Laurie Halse Anderson

This 1999 young-adult book about a teenager dealing with the effects of sexual assault was notably called “soft pornography” in a newspaper op-ed that drew notice from Anderson herself . Speak ’s honesty about its protagonist’s trauma and the subsequent social shunning she endures has made it a perennial classic —and a target for criticism.

His Dark Materials , by Philip Pullman

Pullman’s award-winning fantasy trilogy is populated with talking armored polar bears, soul-sucking specters, and translucent angels. But ultimately, it’s about a war on adolescence. The story’s villains, all affiliated with an allegorical version of the Catholic Church, are motivated by a perverse desire to keep children innocent—even by essentially lobotomizing them. In contrast, the heroes celebrate knowledge and fight to overthrow the religious hierarchy threatening their world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the books were criticized for their supposed anti-Christian themes and plotlines involving witchcraft.

From the November 2019 issue: Philip Pullman’s problem with God

Looking for Alaska , by John Green

The teenagers at Green’s Alabama boarding school drink, smoke, swear, and fumble their way through life. Those actions have made the novel controversial for more than a decade. Green, whose later book The Fault in Our Stars was hugely popular, has repeatedly defended it—including what he calls its intentionally “massively unerotic” oral-sex scene.

Between the World and Me , by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This epistolary book by the famed Atlantic writer reflects on racism’s long shadow. Coates’s frank assessment of the effect of centuries of racial violence on contemporary Black Americans has been attacked in some schools. Between the World and Me and Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power are also included on Representative Krause’s list of books that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”

The Hate U Give , by Angie Thomas

Thomas’s debut young-adult novel was a best seller and was quickly adapted into a film . Starr, a Black teenager, witnesses a white police officer kill her friend at a traffic stop. While navigating her grief, she gradually becomes a public advocate for racial justice. The Hate U Give has been challenged for its profanity and depiction of drug dealing, but most vigorously for its thematic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement. A South Carolina police union objected to its inclusion on a high-school reading list, calling it “ almost an indoctrination of distrust of police .”

Gender Queer , by Maia Kobabe

Through illustrations and tender writing, this graphic memoir follows the nonbinary author’s journey of self-discovery. Its exploration of sexuality and gender, especially in illustrations depicting oral sex, made its inclusion in school libraries a prime target for criticism last year.

In the Dream House , by Carmen Maria Machado

Machado’s captivating, experimental memoir details her abusive relationship with another woman, and her eventual escape from it. At a March 2021 school-board meeting in Leander, Texas, a parent read a sex scene from the book aloud and held up a pink dildo as part of an effort to demand its removal from a book club. In December, the district removed the book permanently from Leander schools.

Read: How surrealism enriches storytelling about women

All Boys Aren’t Blue , by George M. Johnson

The essays in this collection take apart and examine Black masculinity, queer sexuality, and Johnson’s own life. The book has been removed from school libraries in multiple states and lambasted as “sexually explicit,” which the author called “disingenuous for multiple reasons.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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America’s unseen book bans: the long history of censorship in prisons

Tens of thousands of books are banned in US prisons, in an often arbitrary process that limits education opportunities

O n a Monday night, just after six, Alicia Williams waits for the last stragglers to take their seats in her cramped classroom at the Washington corrections center. Her students braved western Washington’s fall weather to get here and they enter the room still ruffled from the wind, their khaki uniforms flecked with rain.

There is no rush. Instead of the lesson she planned to teach, Williams will be relying on hastily adjusted notes and on-the-spot explanations. She’d just heard she wasn’t allowed to teach the book her class was scheduled to discuss that night.

The course is English 233, children’s literature. The offending text? All Boys Aren’t Blue, a book recommended for adolescents ages 16 and up.

For many Americans, the concept of book banning until recently brought up images from earlier, more oppressive societies – grainy black-and-white film of Nazi book burning rallies, photos of McCarthy-era crowds exuberantly hurling books and political pamphlets now considered laughably tame on to bonfires.

But in recent years, books have again become a flashpoint in civic discourse, and book banning and censorship in the education system have made a comeback. Nearly every state has seen conflict over school curricula and public library catalogues.

Groups such as the pressure organization Moms for Liberty have scrutinized school libraries, hunting books that examine race or LGBTQ+ issues and demanding their removal. Conservative commentators have dedicated lengthy segments to the purported dangers of certain books, and have persuaded large swaths of Americans that critical race theory, a graduate-level college course, is being widely taught in US grade schools. Video of fistfights breaking out at PTA meetings and tirades during town halls have racked up millions of internet views. Book banning has entered the talking points of political campaigns, infusing the dynamics of everything from city council elections to gubernatorial and presidential debates. School book bans ballooned 33% between 2022 and 2023, according to the Freedom to Read Foundation, a first amendment defense organization. Authors whose books have been targeted include Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and James Joyce.

Few people are aware, however, that book banning is a widespread and longstanding practice in US prisons . Carceral facilities scrutinize what books and magazines can be offered in their libraries, can be taught in their classes or can be mailed to people on the inside.

In many states, the list of banned publications is long. The Florida department of corrections alone has 22,825 books banned from its libraries, according to an October 2023 report by the non-profit PEN America. The Texas department of corrections is second to Florida with 10,265 bans. The Kansas DOC has banned 7,669 books. Virginia DOC, 7,204. By comparison, in the first eight months of 2023, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom received reports of 1,915 attempts to remove books from public, school and academic libraries.

“Even if you accept the premise that there are dangerous books out there, it strains credulity to suggest there are 10 times as many books that are dangerous for adults than there are books that are dangerous for children,” says Anthony Blankenship, an expert on prison policy at the Washington non-profit Civil Survival. “Florida is the worst when it comes to book banning, but every department of corrections is engaged in it. It’s something educators and incarcerated students have to deal with in every state,” he says.

Particularly troubling, according to PEN America, is the arbitrary way book bans are decided upon by some prison authorities, and the lack of clarity about the qualifications of the people imposing these bans. In a statement, the organization noted that employment at correctional facilities requires only a GED or high school diploma, “which means staff empowered to censor books may have only basic literacy themselves”.

A Washington department of corrections spokesperson said that the agency maintained a publication review committee that approves or restricts books. The spokesperson said that the department created a public list of its banned books, and provided reasons for each ban.

All Boys Aren’t Blue is not on this list.

Additionally, the spokesperson said that restricting All Boys Aren’t Blue from use in classrooms was “a joint decision” made by the department of corrections and Centralia College – the college contracted to teach English 233 – “due to the sexually explicit content in this book”. Williams, the Centralia College instructor, disputes this. She also disputes DOC’s claim that the ban could have been appealed.

“In corrections educations,” she says, “there is no appeal process. I don’t even know who is rejecting content or why.”

Williams says she was told by a department administrator that the book had been banned because the department considers any material relating to homosexuality to be problematic.

Curiously, the reason the administrator cites, Williams says, was that some students may be gay themselves, and that the book could create conflict between straight and gay students. She rejects that rationale.

“If we can’t trust that incarcerated students won’t beat each other up over the identity of book characters, what hope is there for rehabilitation and re-entry into society?”

Williams’s English 233 class guides students in a literary analysis of children’s books across a span of several centuries. The course ordinarily opens with a review of the original Grimm fairytales and works its way through contemporary children’s fiction, including a segment on children’s books that some school districts have recently banned.

“One of the biggest topics in children’s literacy is censorship and book-banning,” says Williams. “Part of the class curriculum is developing a sense of one’s own approach to content selection and censorship.”

Williams, an instructor since 2015, says many students “have never seen or read content that has been banned”, and before taking her class assume books are banned only when they contain extraordinarily explicit sexual content or promote racial conflict. After exposure to banned material, students often come to view the bans as absurd.

“The real growth happens when students have to confront material that is likely to cause discomfort and material from voices that significantly differ from the reader’s,” says Williams.

“Talking about censorship without viewing what has been censored is like going to culinary school without ever tasting the food.”

Education opportunities in prison are a key tool in reducing recidivism, says Blankenship, the prison policy expert. “The more [schooling] you have, the more your recidivism drops. By the time you get to a bachelor’s degree the chances of you going back to prison are basically zero. The department of corrections should be bending over backwards to make education accessible and to avoid interfering with it,” he said.

Not only are books critical to prisoners’ education, they can help many incarcerated people heal from the intense childhood trauma that put them on the path toward prison. Introducing prisoners with histories of adverse childhood experiences to trauma-related literature “helps them look within themselves, and gives them a baseline for how to deal with their trauma”, says Rion Tisino, an ethnic minority mental health specialist at the Washington department of social and health services. “It’s almost like a recipe for dealing with trauma.”

Devonte Crawford, a student in Williams’s children’s literature course, spent much of his life in need of such a recipe. At the age of 10, he was sexually assaulted by an older family member, he says, and the abuse went on for several years. It engendered in him what he describes as “a consuming darkness”. “I started to become a very troubled kid,” says Crawford. As a teen he was drinking and taking drugs “to cover the pain and hatred”. He recalls moving to the west coast for a fresh start, only for his destructive behavior to escalate once he arrived. He was soon serving a 30-year sentence for armed robbery.

It wasn’t until he was 26 and in prison that Crawford discovered a trauma-centered program – created and facilitated by other prisoners – and came to see that his trauma was the primary force driving his self-loathing and aggressiveness. Slowly, he began to heal. He wishes he had encountered a class like that sooner.

“I truly believe that had I been able to see or read about someone going through very similar situations then things would be much different today. It would have been incredible to know that I was not alone.”

For people like Crawford, banning books from prison education “stunts the rehabilitative process”, Tisino says. Trauma-centered literature and programs “help you see the root causes of your negative behaviors and … understand how they perpetuate harm. This is the beginning stage of accountability. But when DOC bans literature that contains traumatic experiences, accountability can be difficult for a person to arrive at.”

Alicia Williams wants prison administrators to weigh education outcomes and the potential for emotional growth when determining which books to permit incarcerated students to study. The point of education, she says, isn’t just to increase knowledge. It also builds a student’s ability to see things from the perspectives of others – a skill that books like All Boys Aren’t Blue are designed to develop.

“What’s likely to happen if someone is exposed to this material? I would say the most likely answer is empathy.”

Sam Levin contributed reporting

• US book bans
• US education
• Washington state

Most viewed

Why Book Bans Are Bad for Mental Health

Banning books may increase mental health risk and reduce empathy..

Posted May 9, 2024 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• Why Education Is Important
• Find a Child Therapist
• Book challenges surged 65% in 2023, reaching the highest level ever documented.
• Research shows that books about characters who are not like the reader are the best for building empathy.
• Book bans may negatively impact the mental health of marginalized individuals, librarians, and youth.

More books have been challenged in recent years than ever before. According to the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), challenges of unique titles surged 65% in 2023 as compared to the previous year, reaching the highest level ever documented by ALA. What’s more, the ALA found that nearly half of demands were made by parents, patrons, or political/religious groups.

The OIF observed that pressure groups focused on public libraries and school libraries, and that often dozens, sometimes hundreds, of titles were challenged by a single entity at a time. Almost half (47%) of the titles challenged represent the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals. This includes Black history, stories with a protagonist of color, and stories that discuss topics like puberty and teen pregnancy (Haupt, A., 2022).

Research supports that book bans are bad for mental health, especially impacting:

• Marginalized individuals whose stories are contained in the majority of challenged books. Research shows that people of color are at a higher risk of facing mental health issues, and have increased barriers to accessing mental health treatment, due to institutional and interpersonal discrimination , stigma , and socioeconomic barriers (Williams DR., 2018). LGBTQIA+ individuals are nearly three times more likely to develop a mental health disorder, like depression or anxiety , and some studies indicate that nearly 45% of LGBTQIA+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the last year (The Trevor Project, 2022). Banning books about the lived experiences and histories of marginalized groups of people only serve to increase feelings of exclusion and invisibility, and intensify their risk of mental health issues (Pickering, G., 2023).
• Children and teens suffer when books are banned in their schools and public libraries for many reasons. As young people are in a developmental period of identity formation with a strong focus on peer relationships, banning diverse books robs them of the opportunity to have an open dialogue and engage in critical thinking in a safe, supportive environment (Pfeifer JH, Berkman ET., 2018). Youth are likely to seek information elsewhere, from unmonitored, unsafe sources, without the support of trusted adults.
• Librarians and school staff experience added stress and anxiety due to the atmosphere of censorship that book banning creates. In fact, research shows that library staff are experiencing an increase in mental health issues in recent years (Shahzad, K., 2024). Many libraries are hiring support staff, like social workers and security, to respond to the rise of confrontational patrons who become aggressive toward librarians, often in response to books or events that they believe should be banned.
• Authors make their livelihood selling books, and book bans not only impact some authors’ income, but might leave them feeling excluded and marginalized as well. With fewer invitations to share their story at schools and libraries, authors and readers are missing out on an opportunity to connect, and to understand the value of another person’s perspective. Social media cruelty toward authors whose books are challenged can mirror cyberbullying, which can cause symptoms of anxiety and depression for the victim (Hu, Y., Bai, Y., Pan, Y., & Li, S., 2021).

The reality is that everyone loses when books are banned because it discourages reading, turning our attention toward social media, web surfing, and television, which negatively impacts the brain’s ability to sustain attention, reduces long-term memory formation and retrieval, and discourages analytical thinking (‌Firth J, et al, 2019). Additionally, this kind of censorship increases discrimination as readers get the message that certain groups of people and topics are “bad,” closing our minds to the opportunity to learn, which is really what reading is all about (Vogels, E., et al, 2021).

Most importantly, when books are banned we’re missing out on one of the most valuable benefits of reading – cultivating empathy. In fact, research shows that books about characters who are not like you are the best for building empathy (Kucirkova N., 2019).

While parents have a right to influence their child’s reading, banning books is detrimental to mental health. Perhaps the answer is not in pulling uncomfortable topics off the shelf, but engaging in conversations that matter, learning from one another’s perspectives, and trusting children to make choices guided by their values, regardless of the words on the page.

Book Ban Data | Banned Books. (n.d.). www.ala.org . https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data

CUPE Research. “ TURNING THE PAGE: Library Workplace Violence and Harassment Survey Report .” March 2023.

‌Firth J, Torous J, Stubbs B, Firth JA, Steiner GZ, Smith L, Alvarez-Jimenez M, Gleeson J, Vancampfort D, Armitage CJ, Sarris J. The "online brain": how the Internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry. 2019 Jun;18(2):119-129. doi: 10.1002/wps.20617. PMID: 31059635; PMCID: PMC6502424.

Haupt A. The rise in book bans, explained. Washington Post. June 9, 2022. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/06/09/rise-book-bans-explained/

Hu, Y., Bai, Y., Pan, Y., & Li, S. (2021). Cyberbullying Victimization and Depression among Adolescents: A Meta-analysis. Psychiatry Research, 305, 114198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2021.114198

Kucirkova N. (2019). How Could Children's Storybooks Promote Empathy? A Conceptual Framework Based on Developmental Psychology and Literary Theory. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 121. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00121

LGBTQ+. (n.d.). NAMI. https://www.nami.org/your-journey/identity-and-cultural-dimensions/lgbt…

Pfeifer JH, Berkman ET. The Development of Self and Identity in Adolescence: Neural Evidence and Implications for a Value-Based Choice Perspective on Motivated Behavior. Child Dev Perspect. 2018 Sep;12(3):158-164. doi: 10.1111/cdep.12279. Epub 2018 Feb 8. PMID: 31363361; PMCID: PMC6667174.

‌Pickering, G. (2023). “Harmful to Minors”: How Book Bans Hurt Adolescent Development. The Serials Librarian, 84(1–4), 32–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2023.2245843

‌Schwering SC, Ghaffari-Nikou NM, Zhao F, Niedenthal PM, MacDonald MC. Exploring the Relationship Between Fiction Reading and Emotion Recognition. Affect Sci. 2021 Apr 20;2(2):178-186. doi: 10.1007/s42761-021-00034-0. PMID: 36043173; PMCID: PMC9382981.

Shahzad, K. , Khan, S.A. and Iqbal, A. (2024), "Mental health issues of university librarians: a systematic literature review", Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication , Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-07-2023-0261

‌The Trevor Project. (2022). 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health. The Trevor Project. https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2022/

Vogels, E., Anderson, M., Porteus, M., Baronavski, C., Atske, S., Mcclain, C., Auxier, B., Perrin, A., & Ramshankar, M. (2021, May 19). Americans and “Cancel Culture”: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/05/19/americans-and-cancel-cu…

Williams DR. Stress and the Mental Health of Populations of Color: Advancing Our Understanding of Race-related Stressors. J Health Soc Behav. 2018 Dec;59(4):466-485. doi: 10.1177/0022146518814251. PMID: 30484715; PMCID: PMC6532404.

Heather Rose Artushin, LISW-CP, is a child and family therapist passionate about the power of reading.

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Book Bans Are Surging in Florida. So Lauren Groff Opened a Bookstore.

It’s called The Lynx, after the wildcat native to the state. “We wanted something a little fierce,” she said.

By Alexandra Alter

On a recent Sunday, Lauren Groff got out of bed at three in the morning, jolted by a mix of anxiety and adrenaline.

It was opening day for The Lynx, Groff’s new bookstore in Gainesville, Fla., and her mind raced with all that could go wrong. So she drove over to the store, where she felt reassured by the presence of some 7,000 books, a collection she had helped to curate.

“I like being there alone, because I’m surrounded by all of my friends,” Groff, a best-selling novelist and three-time National Book Award finalist, said of the books.

A few hours later, she was no longer alone: By 10 a.m., about 100 people had lined up outside the store to watch as Groff cut the ribbon. More than 3,000 people showed up throughout the day for a series of author readings, folk music, live poetry composition and, of course, to buy books.

Groff and her husband, Clay Kallman, had toyed with the idea of opening a bookstore in Gainesville for more than a decade, but the timing never felt right. Groff’s writing career was taking off, and they had two young sons. But last year, as book bans surged across Florida , they decided that their town needed an independent bookstore where titles that had been purged from libraries and classrooms would be on prominent display.

“This store would probably still be a pipe dream if the book bans hadn’t happened,” said Groff, who has lived in Gainesville since 2006. “I want this for me too. I don’t want to live in a place where we stifle free expression.”

Last fall, they found an old building, a 2,300-square-foot former hair salon, on South Main Street in downtown Gainesville. They transformed it into a bookstore and event space, with a cozy reading nook in the children’s book section, a small cafe and large rolling display tables that can be wheeled away to make way for chairs.

For the front of the building, they commissioned a 60-foot-long mural of a lynx, a wildcat native to Florida , sitting sphynx-like next to the store’s motto: “Watch Us Bite Back.”

“We wanted something a little fierce,” Groff said.

Banned titles are prominently placed at The Lynx. A large display near the front of the store features frequently challenged books across the United States — among them “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood; “Beloved” by Toni Morrison; “Tricks” by Ellen Hopkins; and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson.

Groff also hopes to make The Lynx a place where people will come together to discuss books that are being targeted. Upcoming selections for its Banned Books Book Club include “ Gender Queer ” by Maia Kobabe and “ Flamer ” by Mike Curato.

The store’s mission is also resonating outside of Florida. Since The Lynx opened, it has received about $1000 in donations from around the country. Groff plans to use the funds to distribute free copies of banned titles to Florida residents who might not otherwise have access to them.

“At a time when we in Florida need to speak out against the banning of books and against the restriction of reading, she’s going to have a real impact,” said Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of Books & Books, an independent chain in South Florida, who shared advice with Groff when she was preparing to open the store.

Groff is the latest writer to try her hand at book selling, joining Ann Patchett, Louise Erdrich, Judy Blume, Emma Straub, Jenny Lawson, Leah Johnson, Jeff Kinney and others.

This January, Groff attended the Winter Institute, an annual gathering of independent bookstore owners, where she got advice from more seasoned booksellers like Straub and Patchett. Straub said she urged Groff to focus not just on the fun parts of running a bookstore, like effusing over books with customers, but also the practical elements, like learning how to manage the point-of-sales system.

“A lot of us authors don’t spend that much time thinking about that part. We think about the books and the community, all of that big picture stuff, and we don’t necessarily think about the nuts and bolts, retail-ness of it,” Straub said. “Like, oh by the way, you need a mop.”

With its focus on banned books and Florida-centric literature, The Lynx could help make Gainesville more of a literary destination — a hub for author readings, book club gatherings and workshops.

For some local authors, The Lynx already feels like an oasis of sorts.

“This place is not only very welcome, but necessary,” said Amy Hempel, a fiction writer who lives in Gainesville and gave a reading on the store’s opening day, as did the Florida authors David Leavitt, Rebecca Renner, Cynthia Barnett and Kristen Arnett.

The Lynx not only provides a gathering spot for book lovers, Hempel said, but also offers hope to residents who have been discouraged by book bans happening across the state. More than 5,100 books were banned in Florida schools from July 2021 through December 2023 — the highest number in the country, according to PEN America.

“The signal it sends to a community, to the whole state, to the country, at a really heated, difficult time, is such a positive,” Hempel said.

Gainesville isn’t exactly a book desert. It is home to the University of Florida, and has a Books-A-Million and a new Barnes & Noble. But it has lost many of its independent shops. One of its beloved bookstores, Goerings , went out of business in 2010, and another longtime independent, The Florida Bookstore, which was opened by Kallman’s grandfather in 1933 , closed in 2016.

“Gainesville has great potential to have a literary community, but we needed a bookstore,” said Alyssa Eatherly, a Gainesville resident who stopped by The Lynx on a recent evening with her friend, Katie Dreffer, to pick up copies of books that were chosen for the store’s romance book club.

“It’s nice to have something that’s not a big chain,” Dreffer added.

As more people trickled in, Groff greeted customers enthusiastically and asked if they needed recommendations or help finding a book.

“Can I show you where the kids’ section is?” she asked a little girl who came in with her mother. “What do you like?”

The girl followed Groff to the children’s area and asked for a book about ancient history.

Groff asked another shopper who was scanning the display tables if she was able to find what she was looking for. “If you see spots we need to fill, let me know, I’m on it,” she said.

A big draw of The Lynx for many readers and customers, of course, is Groff — an acclaimed writer. She has published two short story collections and five novels, among them her 2023 novel, “The Vaster Wilds,” about a girl who flees to the woods from a colonial settlement in the 1600s, and “Matrix,” her 2021 novel about nuns in medieval England.

Part of the appeal of independent bookstores is their careful curation, and booksellers’ ability to recommend titles based on customers’ interests and moods; who better to help you choose your next book than a best-selling novelist who is also a voracious and wide-ranging reader?

Next to the entrance, on a shelf full of bookseller recommendations, Groff placed a few of her own favorite novels with handwritten notes effusing about them, describing “The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard as “a work of sheer genius,” and calling “Autobiography of Red” by Anne Carson “legit bonkers brilliant.” (Groff’s husband, Kallman, has only one recommended title on the shelf — Groff’s novel, “The Vaster Wilds,” with a note that says, “It slays.”)

Groff conceded that opening the store and meeting the demands of her own writing career has been exhausting. But she’s not especially worried that selling other people’s books will get in the way of writing her own. She often gets up at 5 a.m. to write and is working on three different books.

“I have four to five hours of writing usually, if I’m not opening a bookstore,” she said.

She plans to be intimately involved in the store’s operations, which will be overseen by the store’s three booksellers and two managers.

“I want to know how to do everything so that I can step in if I have to,” she said.

At the grand opening on April 28, Groff was sweaty and frazzled but buoyed by the enthusiasm of the store’s hundreds of visitors. She got up on an outdoor stage and read from a short story titled “Ghosts and Empties” from her 2018 collection, “Florida.”

Over the course of the day, the store sold 1,011 books, including 56 copies of Groff’s, which sold out. The toilet clogged a few times, and some customers gave up because the cash register line was so long, but otherwise, the mood was celebratory.

“Not a single one of us had a breakdown,” Groff said.

Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times. More about Alexandra Alter

The Cumberland City Council book ban threatens to erase queer families. It’s a threat that deserves a serious response

Analysis The Cumberland City Council book ban threatens to erase queer families. It’s a threat that deserves a serious response

There's been a lot of talk about freedom of speech in our country, about what people can read at the library, about what people should see on the internet.

But what strikes me about a lot of these various debates is that it's often only the free speech that people align with that they are prepared to fiercely defend.

Defending the right of others to say and argue points of view, or tell stories about their own lives that some might find immoral or different or wrong  seems a bit more challenging for some — but that's the actual point.

Free speech is meaningless if it is curtailed and weaponised to shut down everyone who doesn't agree with us — or even more obviously this week — to shut down those who we perceive to be the other , who we want to keep in the margins, who we want to treat like freaks that must be censored.

It is with this in mind that I present you with the curious case of Cumberland City Councillor Steve Christou.

When does free speech apply?

Christou is a western Sydney councillor who has railed against the "dictatorial communist regime" of the federal government's eSafety Commissioner , saying that "Australians do not need the government to dictate to them what they can or cannot watch and post on the internet".

Now that view could be defendable if he was a champion of free speech in the actual place he seems to have some control of: the libraries his council runs.

But Christou, who doesn't want the government to tell him what to watch on the internet, is the one who put forward a motion at the Cumberland City Council to ban books after claiming parents had complained about a book titled Same-Sex Parents .

The motion put forward by Christou declared "that council take immediate action to rid same-sex parents books and materials in the council's library service".

It seemed for a minute that we’d been transported across the Pacific to the United States where these culture wars are fought with regularity.

In fact, a report published last month by PEN America found that the number of individual books banned by schools across the US surged to record levels last year.

The report, Banned in the USA: Narrating the Crisis , reports 4,349 book bans recorded across 23 states and 52 public school districts from July to December 2023.

PEN noted that more book bans were recorded during the first half of the current school year than in the entire 2022-2023 year, in which 3,362 books were targeted.

Censorship under the guise of religion

My first instinct was to laugh at the absurdity of a council trying to be the morality police and ban books that show the diversity of families that have legal status in our country.

But there is something more deeply troubling about this and this week we saw political leaders stand up against the absurdity and call it for what it is.

The use of multiculturalism as a weapon against gay and lesbian families was what struck me as the most dangerous. In a country where migrants are expected to fit in, the one exception we seem to be happy to make is when it comes to the acceptance of gay people and their families.

In this instance, multiculturalism and religion were used like a sword to humiliate rainbow families and erase them.

NSW Premier Chris Minns said the Western Sydney council's same-sex parenting book ban was a "joke", while calling on them to immediately repeal the decision or face consequences, including funding cuts.

Christou admitted he hadn't actually read the book, but said he brought forward the ban to protect children from being sexualised.

Labor councillor Mohamad Hussein, one of the key votes that led to the ban, on Wednesday said he had made the decision in line with his religious beliefs and he stood by it.

And there it is. The idea that elected politicians — even at the local level — can censor access to books about queer families under the guise of religion is breathtaking. And the erasure of rainbow families from Western Sydney on the basis that they belong in "Newtown or Marrickville" is a threat to social cohesion that deserves a serious response.

These issues are more than just a political football to be used to grab headlines.

Queer families are everywhere and LGBT people are in our multicultural communities and always have been. The idea that LGBT people should effectively only feel welcome in two suburbs of Sydney is absurd.

The ugliness of homophobia is still with us

The sensitivity in this Sydney council around same-sex couples having children is even more troubling when put in a national context.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, a father-of-three, told the Nine newspapers last week he would like to see Australians have more children.

"It would be better if birth rates were higher," he said in an interview. But in some sections of our country, there is a policing of who is having the babies. We talk a lot about social cohesion fraying at the moment, but we see that in narrow terms.

A motion to rescind the ban will be tabled at the next council meeting this coming week after LGBT groups questioned if such a ban was even lawful.

The timing of this story comes as it was revealed Gold Coast AFL player Wil Powell abused a Brisbane opponent using a homophobic slur last Sunday and was handed a five-match ban by the AFL.

Powell joins Port Adelaide's Jeremy Finlayson as the second player to be banned for using a homophobic slur  in short succession. Finlayson was handed a three-week suspension after he aimed a slur at an Essendon opponent.

Gay rights advocate Ian Roberts, who was the first rugby league player to come out, has called for the AFL to invest more in anti-vilification education.

It strikes me, though, that the ugliness of homophobia is still with us.

Which brings me to Premier Minns, who declared on Saturday that 40 years after the NSW government decriminalised homosexuality he would issue a state apology to those convicted under discriminatory laws that criminalised homosexual acts.

"It's recognition that we can do better and that we have an obligation to do so," he said.

That obligation just became more urgent.

Patricia Karvelas is the presenter of Q+A, which returns tonight at 9.35pm on ABC TV, RN Breakfast and co-host of the Party Room podcast.

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A Sydney council has banned books with same-sex parents from its libraries. But since when did councils ban books?

Sessional Academic, children's literature and creative writing, Victoria University

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Sarah Mokrzycki does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Western Sydney’s Cumberland city council has banned all books depicting same-sex parents in its eight public libraries, citing concerns over the “safety” of children.

The ban was passed (six votes for and five against, while four councillors were not present to vote) at a recent council meeting, and was spearheaded by councillor and former Cumberland mayor Steve Christou. According to the ABC, a process is underway to determine how many books will be banned.

As a queer woman and foster mother to 12 children over the past decade, as well as a researcher on the connection between representation in children’s books and child welfare, I was disheartened to learn Christou had argued books about same-sex parenting “sexualised” children.

Presenting the council with a copy of the children’s picture book Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig , Christou said: “Our kids shouldn’t be sexualised […] This community is a very religious community, a very family-orientated community […]”

Christou said toddlers shouldn’t be “exposed” to same-sex content. His argument epitomises a particular social fallacy that children need to be “taught” about same-sex parented families at a specific, appropriate age.

This speaks to the idea of same-sex relationships as being unnatural or strange, and therefore something that requires explanation and consent to discuss. Conversely, heteronormative relationships are seen as natural and appropriate, and therefore something children are exposed to from birth without explanation.

This status quo does serious damage to children with same-sex parents as well as those without. It questions and dismisses the legitimacy of same-sex parented families, greatly limiting the extent children can see their families represented (in picture books as well as other media) and sending a clear message that their families aren’t “normal”. This, in turn, sends an equally clear message to their peers regarding the validity of same-sex couples as parents.

‘Welcome, belong, succeed’

MP Lynda Voltz and NSW Arts Minister John Graham have expressed concerns over the ban. Voltz believes it may breach the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act. Graham has accused the council of censorship, stating:

It is up to readers to choose which book to take off the shelf. It should not be up to local councillors to make that choice for them or engage in censorship.

Cumberland mayor Lisa Lake and councillor Diane Colman have raised similar concerns . Lake is “appalled and saddened” the ban has passed, stating: “As long as parents are loving families, that’s what’s important.”

Colman told Guardian Australia the ban contradicts the Cumberland city council motto “welcome, belong, succeed”. She said, “Bans like this indicate some people believe that isn’t the case.”

Censorship in Australia

Australia has a long and complicated history with censorship and book banning. The Trade and Customs Act of 1901 controlled the importation of books for most of the 20th century (and banned plenty along the way, including The Catcher in the Rye).

The Australian Classification Board began in 1970. If school boards, community members, or even politicians raise concerns about books, the board – a statutory body – makes a decision about the book’s suitability to be publicly available. The review board consists of a convenor, a deputy convenor and board members, and operates on a “majority-based decision-making procedure”.

It famously struggled with classifying the young adult graphic novel Gender Queer: A memoir by Maia Kobabe, challenged in 2023 by conservative commentator Bernard Gaynor, and ultimately found “appropriate for its intended audience” after appeal.

The book Christou used in his argument, Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig , is what is known as an “issue-based book”, meaning it outlines information rather than presents a narrative. It is recommended for children aged 5-7, and talks directly to the reader , saying:

A small number of people might treat people from same-sex families unfairly. This is not OK. All loving families are good … Remember, as long as you are happy, it doesn’t matter what other people think.

The overall theme appears to be simple reaffirmations of belonging for children in same-sex parenting families.

The actions of Cumberland council are unusual, to say the least. (Earlier this year, the same council passed a motion to ban drag queen “story time” events.)

But in America such library bans are apparently escalating. The key difference is that American libraries are run by their own boards, who dictate library policy . There have been reports of libraries “stacking” boards with “conservative appointees” and closing board meetings to the public.

In the US , attempts to censor books at public libraries increased by 92% from 2022 to 2023, accounting for about 46% of all book challenges in the US in 2023. As TV host John Oliver revealed this week , library staff there have experienced “a huge increase in harassment, with some baselessly accused of paedophilia for allowing certain books to be checked out”.

It remains to be seen what the fate of this ban will be. Its implementation may impact Cumberland library’s government funding , and action is being taken by advocacy groups. Rainbow Families , an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ families in Australia, has reportedly spoken to the anti-discrimination board about getting the ban reversed.

Meanwhile, a Cumberland community member has started a petition calling on the council to “rescind the motion banning books about same-sex parents”. She will present it to the council at a meeting next Wednesday.

Ultimately, Cumberland’s ban is counter-intuitive. When children, and their families, are represented in books, it creates inclusivity rather than division , promoting a greater sense of community – and a better understanding of what makes a family.

• Western Sydney
• Children's books
• Public libraries
• Same-sex parents
• Book censorship

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