DebtDavid Graeber
After MidnightIrmgard Keun
“I grew up in South Tucson. So when I go down to Tucson Unified School District, I’m going home.” — John Huppenthal Like many of us, John Huppenthal would seem to have complicated feelings about “home.” In June of last year the newly elected Arizona…
British publisher Peter McGee, of London-based publishing house Albertas Press, has apparently backed down from his vow to publish excerpts from Adolf Hitler‘s book Mein Kampf (see the earlier MobyLives report) after a German court ruled to do so would be in violation of copyright.…
“At least half-a-dozen court cases have been filed against four authors and three organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival where extracts from Salman Rushdie‘s banned book The Satanic Verses were publicly read on January 20,” according to this report in the Times of India. Among…
Less than a month after Britain’s biggest bookstore chain, Waterstones, had to apologize because branches in Yorkshire, Manchester, Liverpool and Cheshire “pushed Adolf Hitler‘s manifesto Mein Kampf as the ‘perfect’ Christmas present” (see the Guardian report), the book is back in the news with yet another…
Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses and famously the target of a fatwah by the Ayatollah Khomeni, is once again at the center of another controversy, according to a Times of India report: It is the same old story for celebrated author Salman Rushdie,…
As many of you might now know, Ragip Zarakolu, the owner of Belge Publishing House, was arrested last Friday along with 40 other pro-Kurdish on charges of terrorism, though this isn’t his first brush with the police. The Turkish publisher has consistently violated Article 312…
For six years late in her life, the German author Irmgard Keun lived in the psychiatric ward in a hospital in Bonn. After being discharged in 1972 she lived an impoverished existence in a small studio apartment. Everyone had forgotten her wildly bestselling, radically feminist novels of the Weimar…
Berkeley County, South Carolina thinks it has solved some of the thorniest questions of criminal rehabilitation and is doubling down on a controversial policy that allows inmates to read nothing but paperback bibles. Alexandra Silver reported for Time in April that the Department of Justice had…
REPORTER: Do you find your second novel coming slow? MISS LEE: Well, I hope to live to see it published. (From the transcript of press conference published in Rogue magazine December 1963) What everyone knows about Harper Lee, born on this day, April 28th in…
Last week the American Library Association (ALA) released their Top Ten List of the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010. As we mentioned in our report, Melville House author, librarian, blogger, and activist Amy Sonnie (Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in…