“This is a dangerous time for readers and the public servants who provide access to reading materials. Readers, particularly students, are losing access to critical information, and librarians and teachers are under attack for doing their jobs.”
For more information visit BannedBooksWeek.
Banned for Graphic Content
The limitless scope of human emotion and experience are depicted in these stories, which give an eloquent voice to the terrible wounds we inflict on those closest to us.
Banned for Lascivious Content
Drawn from Nin's original, uncensored journals, Fire continues the story of one woman's quest to discover and liberate herself sexually, artistically, and emotionally.
Banned for Graphic Depictions of Violence, Sex, and Drug Use
A former L.A. gang member describes his experiences in that world, recounting the sense of security and power found in a gang and the grim reality of violence and poverty.
Banned for Promiscuous Sex
Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist's faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers.
Banned for LGBTQIA+ Themes
With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Banned for Sexual Content
Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl, prays every day for beauty. This novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender.
Banned for Explicit Language and Sexual Content
Roth's masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience.
Banned for Critiquing American History and Exploration of Race as a Social Construct
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him.
Banned for Explicit Language, Violence, and Sexual References
Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past-a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America.
Banned for Sexual Content
A single sinful act ruins the lives of three people. None more so than Hester Prynne, a young, beautiful, and dignified woman, who conceived a child out of wedlock and receives the public punishment of having to always wear a scarlet 'A' on her clothing.
Banned for Social/Political Themes and Sexual Content
Portrays a terrifying vision of life in the future when a totalitarian government, considered a "Negative Utopia," watches over all citizens and directs all activities, becoming more powerful as time goes by.
Banned for Bestiality, Infanticide, Sexual and Violent Content
Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is persistently haunted by the ghost of her dead baby girl.
Banned for Sexual Content
The story takes place on one day, 16 June 1904, or Bloomsday, which was the anniversary of Joyce's first walk with his beloved Nora Barnacle. It (very) loosely follows the episodes of Ulysses from the Odyssey of Homer though in a reordered form.
Banned for Racial and Sexual Content
A young girl living in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago ponders the advantages and disadvantages of her environment and evaluates her relationships with family and friends.
Banned due to Portrayal of Islam
A hijacked jumbo jet blows apart high above the English Channel. Two figures, Gibreel and Saladin, are washed up on an English beach. Soon curious changes occur--Gibreel seems to have acquired a halo, while Saladin grows hooves and bumps at his temples. They are transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil.
Banned for Graphic Violence
A juvenile delinquent of the near future tells, in his semi-private language, of his crimes and punishment.
Banned for Violent and Sexual Content
Dune is the source of brilliant survival techniques devised by the desert dwellers, the focus of political intrigues, and the nexus of a centuries old plot to create a superbeing.
Banned for Themes of Pedophilia and Incest
Awe and exhilaration -- along with heartbreak and mordant wit -- abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
Banned for Explicit Language and Criticism of Historical Migrant Treatment
A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America
Banned for Sexual Content, Sexual Abuse, Religious Themes
This is the tale of family, memory, love, and living told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. Through the voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief a hopeful and joyful story.
Banned for Sexual Violence
The story of a gifted young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a beautiful woman who struggles to defeat him.
Banned for Depictions of Sexual Abuse
Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.
Banned for Profanity and Sexual Content
Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric, Snow Falling on Cedars is a masterpiece of suspense-- one that leaves us shaken and changed.
Banned due to views on Racism, Violence and Politics
The controversial leader of the Black Muslims tells the story of his life and his part in the civil rights movement.
Banned for a Critical Perspective on American History
Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
Banned due to Explicit Language and Depictions of Violence and Suicide
Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive.
Banned due to Depictions of Child Abuse
Dave's story does not focus on his life-threatening plight as much as on his unyielding determination to create a better life for himself.
Banned due to Explicit Language, Political, Social and Religious Viewpoints, and Drug Use
Author Barbara Ehrenreich decides to see if she can scratch out a comfortable living in blue-collar America. What she discovers is a culture of desperation, where workers often take multiple low-paying jobs just to keep a roof overh
Banned for Critique of American History and Supporting Critical Race Theory
As Kendi provocatively illustrates, racist thinking did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Racist ideas were created and popularized in an effort to defend deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and to rationalize the nation's racial inequities in everything from wealth to health.
Banned for LGBTQIA+ Content and Sexually Explicit Images
Maia's autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes coming out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fan fiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears.