News Room
This year, Banned Books Week is running from October 5-11, with the theme “Censorship Is So 1984. Read for Your Rights.” From titles like The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984 to A Court of Thorns and Roses and even the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the number of books being banned across the country has grown exponentially in the last few years. The 2023-2024 school year had the highest instances of book bans at over 10,000.
Despite the increase in book bans, important work is being done to counteract them. Online communities are centering their discussions around banned books, encouraging reading titles that confront and expand people’s world view. There are new posts under #bannedbooks every day, bringing awareness to what is being censored and urging others to go out and buy them now. Organizations, like STOP Moms for Liberty, are forming to counter those that advocate against the teaching of LGBTQ+ rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination.
This September, a coalition of free expression organizations based in Florida banded together to write a letter in support of federal court Judge Carlos Mendoza’s ruling that House Bill 1069 is unconstitutional. HB 1069 is a Florida law passed in 2023 that simplified the requirements to challenge and remove books from K-12 public schools, targeting books that depict or describe sexual content, and allowed the removal of books immediately after objection. This letter, addressed to District School Leaders, urges to restore the removed titles, review objections with integrity, and lift prohibitions on titles that did not receive a fair review.
The coalition offers their stance and their support, as they are exploring ways to support schools in replenishing collections, financially or through donation. This action against censorship is encouraging for our future, and while things recently may seem hopeless, there is work being done to fight and counter these acts of restriction.
George Takei will serve as the honorary chair of Banned Books Week this year, bringing with him his passion for the right to read and against censorship.
Here at Grove Atlantic, we believe in the importance of reading books that challenge the way you think and expand your worldview and your empathy. To encourage this, we’ve put together a short list of books that have content that’s consistently targeted and censored. Regularly books with LGBTQ+ content are challenged simply for queer representation and thus deemed sexually explicit. Books that combat racism or include diverse representation are similarly challenged, as well as books with depictions of sexual abuse, drug use, and profanity. It’s important for us to use our voices now. Supporting authors and books that are often targeted is the first step in fighting back, and continuing to promote books with these themes is how we ensure they stay in circulation. We are proud to have a history of publishing subversive literature that has faced censorship and won, and we will continue to uplift those voices that others try to quell.
Read these books before they’re banned:
Racebook by Tochi Onyebuchi
Coming out October 21.
From the author of Hugo and NAACP Image Award finalist Riot Baby, an original memoir in essays that interrogates how identities are shaped and informed in online spaces and how the relationship between race and the Internet has changed in his three decades online. An investigation of race through the lens of the modern internet age and an affecting journey into the heart of community online, Racebook argues for recognizing the individual behind the binary code that shapes our digital lives.
“Racebook is absolutely singular in the history of book-making, and the love shown to Black folks and our internet here is as textured as anything Morrison made.”—Kiese Laymon
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
With a new introduction and afterword by the author comes the 40th anniversary edition of a beloved modern classic and pioneering work of autofiction—a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl’s quirky passage into adulthood. It is considered a classic of contemporary literature and taught widely around the world, in courses ranging from core undergraduate classes to women’s studies and queer studies.
“To read Jeanette Winterson is to love her.”—O, the Oprah Magazine
Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro
In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures. The Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions and lives off the grid in a cabin—sees a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrist in the back seat of a car, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. As their uncertain dynamic evolves, Michael is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.
Queer Enlightenments by Anthony Delaney
Queer people have always existed. In an era when this basic truth faces undue scrutiny, here is a dazzling work of restorative history that reveals the hard-won lives of those who dared to break the mold in the “long eighteenth-century.” At once an illuminating romp through the historical archive and an evocative new chapter in our shared history, Dr. Anthony Delaney’s Queer Enlightenments uncovers the remarkable queer people of that complex, sometimes paradoxical time.
“A rare combination of bold ideas, rigorous archival research, and a personal voice, Queer Enlightenments introduces us to a fascinating range of characters.”—Emma Donoghue
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, Young Mungo is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men. Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars, a Protestant and Catholic respectively. They should be sworn enemies, yet against all odds, they become best friends. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, a place where they might still have a future.
“Vividly realised and emotionally intense, this scorching novel is an urgent addition to the new canon of unsung stories.”—Bernardine Evaristo
Medusa of the Roses by Navid Sinaki
Anjir and Zal are childhood best friends turned adults in love. The only problem is they live in Iran, where being openly gay is criminalized, and the government’s apparent acceptance of trans people requires them to surgically transition and pass as cis straight people. Anjir, who’s always identified with the mythical gender-changing Tiresias, will become a woman, and they’ll move to a new town for a fresh start as husband and wife.
“Very rarely does a book come along that you feel might save lives, including your own. Medusa of the Roses is the most dynamic literary debut, certainly of the Iranian queer canon, I have ever read!”—Porochista Khakpour
Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe
Frighten the Horses is a trans man’s coming of age story, about a housewife who comes out as a lesbian and tentatively, at first, steps into the world of queerness. Oliver had spent his entire life denying the deepest, truest parts of himself. In the wake of this realization, he began the challenging, messy journey toward self-acceptance and living a truer life, knowing he risked the life he’d built to do so.
“Radclyffe’s memoir offers a valuable alternate narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on.”—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, New York Times
Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad
From the award-winning novelist comes an outstanding essay on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative. Nine days before October 7, 2023, award-winning author Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history.
“Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.”—Rashid Khalidi
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Winner of the Booker Prize 2023
Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together. On a dark evening in Dublin, scientist and mother Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family?
“Monumental . . . you remember why fiction matters. It’s hard to recall a more powerful novel in recent years.”—Samantha Harvey
A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life by Felicia Kornbluh
In A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life, historian Felicia Kornbluh delivers the untold story of everyday activists who defined reproductive rights and achieved them, in the years immediately before and after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal under federal law. Following the story of two movements in New York: the fight to decriminalize abortion and the fight against sterilization abuse. Their histories cast new light on constitutional rights, the difficulty and importance of achieving truly inclusive feminism, and on reproductive politics today.
“Felicia Kornbluh makes an important and enlightening contribution to the history of American radicalism and social movements.”—Sarah Schulman
