RotisStephane Reynaud
Faithful RuslanGeorgi Vladimov
Farah Samti at Tunisia Live reports that rather than being wiped out, literary censorship has ‘simply changed forms’ since the country’s revolution. Before, books seen as harmful to the regime of Ben Ali were stopped, without further explanation, at the airport. Now, notes bookseller Adel…
“The Vatican has denounced as ‘criminal’ a new book of leaked internal documents that shed light on power struggles inside the Holy See and the inner workings of its embattled bank, and warned that it would take legal action against those responsible,” according to this…
“Police crackdowns and attacks by religious extremists have attempted to derail the book tour of famed Muslim Canadian author Irshad Manji through Indonesia, a country she previously described as a symbol of ‘meaningful moderation in Islam,’” according to a report in the National Post. Manji…
Is the Wizard of Oz just too much for the innocent American public? Government censors think so. The Electronic Frontiers Foundation blog DeepLinks does a weekly round-up called “this week in transparency.” Among this worrying list of secrecy about drones and surveillance, was something of a more literary bent.…
A new bill, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA), is re-igniting the fight SOPA started. This time, however, there are new and worrying battlelines. According to Dan Rowinski of Read Write Web, “CISPA is different from SOPA and PIPA in that it’s…
What to do when the guest of honor does not always behave so honorably? The London Book Fair faces this question and others just like it by welcoming China as this year’s high-profile guest of honor. Criticism of the LBF has been steady for more than…
The Burmese publishing industry is wasting no time in responding to the country’s new political mood. In late March, a year after the new government took power, there were pledges to loosen censorship laws, and to get rid of them entirely by the end of…
After so much talk about scary new forms of censorship, it’s interesting to reflect on the halcyon days when prudish customs officials were sometimes all we had to worry about. David Pescovitz writes on Boing Boing that Nicole Moore, a literary historian, has uncovered thousands of banned…
According to a human rights group that advises the UN, Dante’s Divine Comedy should be banned from Italian schools because it is ‘offensive and discriminatory’. Speaking for the group Gherush92, its president Valentina Sereni said this week: We do not advocate censorship or the burning of…
The big online platforms seem to have sex on their minds just as much as the current Republican field. Paypal is the latest internet giant to begin censoring books that it considers to be sexually explicit or obscene. (See MobyLives’ earlier article on Apple’s ebook…