Book banning’s effect on book sales, why kids will still read what's banned, and more of The Atlantic's coverage.
To those who seek to stop young people from reading The Handmaid’s Tale: Good luck with that. It’ll only make them want to read it more. It’s shunning time in Madison County, Virginia, where the school board recently banished my novel The Handmaid’s Tale from the shelves of the high-school library. I …
It seems a harsh and frankly hopeless errand to try to keep literature away from young people because you fear they will be exposed to opinions and experiences you do not share. I wasn’t surprised when my 14-year-old began borrowing my books; if anything, I’d expected her to start doing so earlier, …
“I’ve been called a pedophile. I’ve been called a groomer. I’ve been called a Communist pornographer.” The line for the tattoo station at the annual conference of the New York Library Association in Saratoga Springs was already snaking through the hotel lobby, and I hadn’t even had my first …
When a book gets censored, it feels good to assume its sales will increase. But that’s not the whole story. At a packed school-board meeting near Rockford, Illinois, earlier this year, a woman waved blown-up images from Maia Kobabe’s illustrated memoir Gender Queer in front of the Harlem School …
The possibility of a more just future is at stake when young people are denied access to knowledge of the past. The instinct to ban books in schools seems to come from a desire to protect children from things that the adults doing the banning find upsetting or offensive. These adults often seem …
What makes the book controversial is exactly what makes it valuable. In the 1970s, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman jotted down a thought in a notebook. “Maybe Western civilization has forfeited any right to literature with a big ‘L,’” he wrote. “Maybe vulgar, semiliterate, unsubtle comic books are an …
