Description: Professors, high school teachers, novelists, anti-censorship advocates, and librarians confront and examine the banning of books in the U.S. in current, historical, and international contexts.
Brief description: Samuel Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA, where he teaches a course on banned books. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2010) and co-editor of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012) and The Clash Takes on the World (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is the series editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture.
Review Quotes:
"By including so many perspectives, the volume gives a vitally expansive sense of what, exactly, we mean when we say 'book ban.'" --Los Angeles Review of Books
"Essays vigorously advocating freedom of access and freedom from censorship in the realms of reading." --Kirkus Reviews "Banning Books in America could not be more timely. In a moment rife with politicians bullying school leaders directly or passing laws to facilitate educational censorship in schools, colleges, and universities, everyone who cares about American democracy should be thinking about what they can do to help. Luckily, this authoritative collection offers thoughtful, engaging guidance to do just that. This is a must-read for those who want to learn about book bans and to fight against this assault on democracy." --Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms Managing Director, U.S. Free Expression Programs, PEN America "Banning books - the nowness of the problem - is at the core of the dilemma as we struggle to define, interpret, limit, and resist constraints on reading. Samuel Cohen brings together teachers, scholars, and writers themselves to help us understand, value, and protect what is increasingly at risk. Listen up, everybody. There's work to do." --William Germano, Cooper Union, and author of On Revision