>Jokers to the left of me, jokers to the right
>Leila pointed me to this case in Seattle of Brave New World being yanked from the curriculum for being insensitive re Native Americans. The Prez has already gotten in trouble (per usual) with Fox...
View Article>Yes, it’s a book, but . . .
>Lane Smith’s It’s a Book got into hot water on Boston’s North Shore when a literacy foundation tried to donate copies to 340 first graders via their schools. While I don’t buy into the harrumphing...
View Article>Take it from the old stage manager
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View Article>Shoulda stuck to their guns
>Colleen has a great post up summarizing the drama that’s been going on around Bitch Magazine’s publication of “100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader.” The comments on the magazine’s site...
View Article>Gratuitous or essential?
>Watching the Grammys the other night and finally succumbing to the hook they seemed to be playing over and over (reminding me of the night, now and forever, the Tonys would not let go of “Midnight...
View Article>Come to the movies
>On June 25th at 8:00PM at the ALA conference in New Orleans, ALSC is presenting a free screening of The Library of the Early Mind, a documentary about contemporary children’s literature including...
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Don’t shoot the messengers
Richard just sent me a link to Julie Bosman’s report in the NYT Arts Blog about the digitalization of Judy Blume: “Beginning on Mar. 21, 13 of Ms. Blume’s books, including “Are You There God? It’s Me,...
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When librarians do stupid things
Sometimes we really are our own worst enemy. Somebody take away this lady’s library card. And has anyone read these Fifty Shades of Grey? How is it? The post When librarians do stupid things appeared...
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O Come All Ye Faithful?
Don’t miss Leonard Marcus’s latest column about picture book covers, and speaking of that, SLJ stalwart Rocco Staino reports on a gallery of ‘em that would make Judy Blume blush. Or would they? The...
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Now you’re telling us?
While Gary Soto seems a bit of a fragile flower in this essay about why he’s been scared off writing for children, I have sympathy for him. If your book is sexy or foul-mouthed or anti-authority, you...
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Moving moment No. 6
Ooh, who remembers this one? In 1982, the library systems of Chicago, Milwaukee, and San Francisco banned Margot Zemach’s Jake and Honeybunch Go to Heaven from their collections (Chicago, from where I...
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This is not just about opera
from the English National Opera production of The Death of Klinghoffer The Metropolitan Opera’s cancellation of the announced HD broadcast of The Death of Klinghoffer is galling for a number of...
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Thanks for Annie, Nancy.
I was very sorry to read that Nancy Garden died on Monday. While she wrote in just about every children’s-book genre there is, it’s Annie on My Mind that made her immortal, and led to her parallel,...
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Banned Books Week 2014
It’s Banned Books Week! From The American Library Association’s website: “Each year, the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom compiles a list of the top ten most frequently challenged books in order...
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Cause to celebrate?
If it’s time for Banned Books Week it’s also time for my annual bucket ‘o scorn for ALA’s cynical exercise in spin. Like Bette Davis in Storm Center, “I’m tired. I’m tired and beaten. There’s no use...
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WTF, ALA?
The new Banned Books Week poster has too many design elements to keep straight, uses a dumb and hard to parse neologism as its main message, and dog-whistles anti-Islamic sentiment with an image of...
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THIS, my dears, is censorship.
We talk a lot in this field (and on this blog, I guess) about censorship. And most of the time we use the term loosely, describing those who challenge a book’s distribution by a library, for example,...
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Beyond the Pluto Problem
Perusing Debbie’s Reese’s provocative (to me, anyway!) and useful site American Indians in Children’s Literature, I came across a comment she made referencing and linking to the Texas State Library’s...
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Whips AND chains
I’d really like to ban the term “self-censorship” from discourse, given that we already have a spectrum of words–from “prudence” to “cowardice”–that say more precisely what we mean, and because it...
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Freeing writers AND readers
Mrs. Trimmer I agree with Allie Jane Bruce that “kids say this stuff” is a piss-poor reason for racist language in books for children. It’s a piss-poor reason generally, as the point of fiction has...
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