The topic of censorship is found in an array of disciplines. From a historical perspective, we find censorship in the silencing of minority voices. Voices that speak out against or dispute religious ideas. From a feminist perspective, we find censorship in the suppression of progressive ideas regarding women’s rights and power.
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” - Ray Bradbury
The type of censorship most commonly talked about is censorship in literature and media. This has varied over different centuries and different cultures. In the United States, producers, schools, and parents refrain from introducing minors to content containing a lot of mature language, violence, or sexual references and depictions. Most people would agree with the restriction of these themes for young children. However, over the last few decades, more pieces of literature are being challenged by society for contested reasons.
In the last 10 years, LGBTQ+ books have been challenged more with people citing religious reasons for not wanting their children to engage with the topic. In more recent years, books that discuss race and police brutality have been contested for various reasons. Parents who bring the challenges say they don’t want their children getting “bad ideas” or “wrong perspectives” on issues that are only growing more apparent in society. “You can determine, almost infer, from the list of banned books or challenged books what’s going on in society at that time,” says Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, Randy Robertson. With the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, books that discuss the topics should come to the forefront of education, but they are instead being negated by parents and schools who believe they are doing what’s best for children. “There’s an attempt, in a very literal sense, to push back the movement,” adds Robertson.
So then, who should be able to choose what pieces of literature children are allowed to consume? At what age do we allow the youth of our society to decide for themselves what they want to include in their education? According to scholars, there is no clear answer. Part of being a citizen is learning self-government, being able to make decisions for yourself. “These children are going to grow up in a society at some point, and that society is going to consist of more than just family,” says Robertson. Education is an introduction into a broader sense of the world than what you grew up in. So, while scholars don’t agree on a specific age, they do agree that censorship of important societal issues can harm a child’s development of individual thought.
“By restricting children for whatever ostensible, moral, or religious reasons, is to limit that person’s ability to be a citizen in a larger culture.” - Randy Robertson
Outside of individual parents and school boards, there are some forms of censorship at the government level. Some scholars argue that how states set up their restrictions is on its face unconstitutional. In the case of the Board of Education, Island Trees School District v. Pico, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books …” If a book is contested, an inquiry must be done into the motives and reasons of the party calling for its removal. Removing a book from a school shelf requires more reasoning than that it conflicts with personal beliefs. Doing so is considered to be violating school student’s First Amendment rights.
What can and should students do to protect their rights and fight against the banning of books? Bring public awareness to the situation. More often than not, these cases will favor the majority. Students have the power to protest for the education that they want to receive. Progression can fight against regression. Utilizing the media, spreading awareness to the damages caused by censorship, is a unique tool for younger generations.
Every year, the American Library Association does just that. Banned Books Week is an annual awareness campaign that celebrates the freedom to read, and draws attention to banned and challenged books. To learn more about their mission and banned books, visit their website.
This definition is the epitome of what Siglio has to offer. “Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera” by Richard Kraft, for example, is a collage narrative comprised of page upon page of densely layered, fantastic imagery that fills every available space. 
“Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins”, on the other hand, is a collection of writings by the “polyartist,” poet, scholar, theorist, composer, performer, and publisher Dick Higgins, who restored the term “intermedia” to the English language and “exploited and subverted conventional book production and marketing strategies to get unconventional and avant-garde works into the hands of new and often unsuspecting readers.” Each book is more startling and well-written than the last, and all are guaranteed to captivate.
We're gearing up for our first Book Club at the Brew Pub meeting of the school year downtown at our favorite local pub, the 
You made it to fall break! Take a few days to relax & grab one of these new additions to the Leisure Reading Collection to enjoy!
PS3603.L5656 S73 2021
Named one of the most anticipated novels of the season by People, Associated Press, Time, Los Angeles Times, Parade, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more.
From the #1 bestselling authors Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny comes a novel of unsurpassed thrills and incomparable insider expertise—State of Terror.
After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state.
There is no love lost between the president of the United States and Ellen Adams, his new secretary of state. But it’s a canny move on the part of the president. With this appointment, he silences one of his harshest critics, since taking the job means Adams must step down as head of her multinational media conglomerate.
As the new president addresses Congress for the first time, with Secretary Adams in attendance, Anahita Dahir, a young foreign service officer (FSO) on the Pakistan desk at the State Department, receives a baffling text from an anonymous source.
Too late, she realizes the message was a hastily coded warning.
What begins as a series of apparent terrorist attacks is revealed to be the beginning of an international chess game involving the volatile and Byzantine politics of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; the race to develop nuclear weapons in the region; the Russian mob; a burgeoning rogue terrorist organization; and an American government set back on its heels in the international arena.
As the horrifying scale of the threat becomes clear, Secretary Adams and her team realize it has been carefully planned to take advantage of four years of an American government out of touch with international affairs, out of practice with diplomacy, and out of power in the places where it counts the most.
To defeat such an intricate, carefully constructed conspiracy, it will take the skills of a unique team: a passionate young FSO; a dedicated journalist; and a smart, determined, but as yet untested new secretary of state.
State of Terror is a unique and utterly compelling international thriller cowritten by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th secretary of state, and Louise Penny, a multiple award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling novelist.
Description from Simon and Schuster
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
PS3604.O34 C56 2021
Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award!
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time, comes the highly anticipated Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Set in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.
Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.
Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.
Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders who find resourcefulness and hope in the midst of gravest danger. Their lives are gloriously intertwined. Doerr’s dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive that we forget, for a time, our own. Dedicated to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come,” Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship—of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.
Description from Simon and Schuster
PS3620.A93534 F55 2021
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Time, Elle, Enterntainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, O: The Oprah Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, BuzzFeed, Vulture, Thrillist, The Week, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, The Millions, and Paperback Paris
A group portrait of young adults enmeshed in desire and violence, a hotly charged, deeply satisfying new work of fiction from the author of Booker Prize finalist Real Life.
In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.
One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as “a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways.” With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.
Description from Penguin Random House
The Cruelty is the Point by Adam Serwer
E185.615 .S395 2021
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a damning case that cruelty is not merely an unfortunate byproduct of the Trump administration but its main objective and the central theme of the American project.
Like many of us, Adam Serwer didn’t know that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election. But over the four years that followed, the Atlantic staff writer became one of our most astute analysts of the Trump presidency and the volatile powers it harnessed. The shock that greeted Trump’s victory, and the subsequent cruelty of his presidency, represented a failure to confront elements of the American past long thought vanquished.
In this searing collection, Serwer chronicles the Trump administration not as an aberration but as an outgrowth of the inequalities the United States was founded on. Serwer is less interested in the presidential spectacle than in the ideological and structural currents behind Trump’s rise—including a media that was often blindsided by the ugly realities of what the administration represented and how it came to be.
While deeply engaged with the moment, Serwer’s writing is also haunted by ghosts of an unresolved American past, a past that torments the present. In bracing new essays and previously published works, he explores white nationalism, myths about migration, the political power of police unions, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. For all the dynamics he examines, cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion. Serwer argues that rather than pretending these four years didn’t happen or dismissing them as a brief moment of madness, we must face what made them possible and continues to endure. Unless we confront these toxic legacies, the fragile dream of American multiracial democracy will remain vulnerable to the forces that have nearly destroyed it time and again.
Description from Penguin Random House
PS3619.O43724 S67 2021
A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction
Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.
But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.
To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.
Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.
Description from Macmillan
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
PS3573.H4768 H37 2021
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.
“Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…” To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home.
Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.
Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either.
Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the “Waldorf of Harlem”—and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. The heist doesn’t go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.
Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?
Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.
Description from Penguin Random House
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