Members of the New York Public Library can download hundreds of thousands of titles at the click of a button, from children’s books to the latest essay on Ukraine. Without leaving home, free and in a matter of seconds. Or approach if you prefer any of the hundreds of branches that the institution has spread throughout all the neighborhoods of the city. Now, in addition, as a temporary sanctuary for freedom of expression, the institution will offer the general public a list of books that are prohibited or persecuted in various states of the country: works on gender issues, LGTBIQ+, identity, race… All those issues awakening the demons of the radical right, in a country polarized to the core and in which the Republican veto is contributing ardently to rewriting a crude version of the classic Fahrenheit 451the dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury that already in the fifties lit up an apocalyptic scenario, of burning pyres of books.
Thanks to a new program announced this week, anyone, not just cardholders of the New York Public Library – a free public service – can search, borrow and read electronically a selection of questionable books (already often banned) after downloading them for free in the library app. The program, called Books for Everyonewill extend in principle until the end of May.
The initiative includes a list of controversial titles that have attracted special attention, some for decades and others in recent months, in the long-running battle between supporters of the right of parents to select the books that their children read at school and libraries, and those who recall the much greater risks that banning books has historically entailed. It is not a new controversy, the institution recalled when presenting the program, “the difference at this time is that some States are raising these complaints to the rank of law.”
Banning books from public libraries and schools is not a recent phenomenon, but it has spread across the United States like an oil stain, thanks to the radicalization of the right and its reaction to social mobilizations against racism or the progressive normalization of the community LGBTQ+. Sexual and racially themed content is predominant in most of the censored books: Maus, Art Spiegelman’s classic Holocaust graphic novel, removed from school reading list; a lovedthe work on the experience of slavery by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, going through The Handmaid’s Tale of Margaret Atwood and her crude denunciation of totalitarianism.
Also bestsellers such as the Harry Potter and Twilight sagas have literally been burned in fundamentalist pyres for their “demonic influence on youth”. Reading an irreverent children’s book in a Mississippi elementary school led to the firing of the assistant teacher who had chosen her. Among the censors there are from parents to Republican governors, through pastors.
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New York is not Tennessee or Texas or Oklahoma, some of the most critical and censorious States of the books that those who vote for their governors do not like. New York is an ideological and cultural island, and the great Public Library, one of the treasures of a city in which most leisure options are paid. In a post published this Wednesday, entitled The New York Public Library supports the right to read banned booksthe president of the institution, Tony Marx, points out that its role is “to make sure that no perspective, no idea, no identity is erased.”
“People have the right to read or not read what they want, but those books must be available, for the adolescent who has questions and wants to find answers in private; for the adult who is curious about topics in which they have no personal experience; for those who want to do their own digging and make informed decisions based on facts,” she wrote.
The new Index has found in the venerable New York institution, which houses hundreds of untold stories underground and the accumulated wisdom of millions of works, a brake, at least for now. Among the titles offered by the program is a classic of American literature: The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger, the novel that has inoculated the love of reading in dozens of generations and that, due to its approach to issues such as prostitution, sex in adolescence or the consumption of alcohol and tobacco, figures in the narrow sights of censors since it was published. To underline his fame as a cursed, it is the book that John Lennon’s murderer carried with him when he ended the musician’s life…
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