
In light of the recent wave of book bannings taking place across The United of States, The Stacks is spending all week talking with people who are impacted by the bannings, ranging from students to educators, authors, and more, to help us think about what is at stake and what we can do.
We start today’s episode with Mississippi high school student Timya Wright. Timya shares how she feels about adults telling young people what books they can have access to and the kinds of books she wishes were taught in school. Then we’re joined by Azar Nafisi, the bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and the forthcoming Read Dangerously:The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. We talk about Azar’s about the need to nurture freedom. We also hear about authors Rebecca Carroll, R. Eric Thomas, and R. O. Kwon’s favorite banned books.
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Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes. You can also find everything we talked about on Amazon.
Timya Wright

- Long Division by Kiese Laymon
- Cyber Bully (Charles Binamé, 2011)
- Black Buck by Mateo Askariapour
- Shallow Waters by Anita Kopacz
- “Ep. 151 Truth and Satire with Mateo Askariapour” (The Stacks)
- Jerid Woods (@ablackmanreading)
- Books are Pop Culture
- Toni Morrison
- Heavy by Kiese Laymon
- The Little Mermaid (John Musker and Ron Clements, 1989)
- Rebecca Carroll
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
- R. Eric Thomas
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- R.O. Kwon
- Heavy by Kiese Laymon
Azar Nafisi

- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
- Read Dangerously by Azar Nafisi
- Fatwah against salman rushdie
- Toni Morrison
- Maus by Art Spiegelman
- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
- “Amazon Bans, Then Reinstates, Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’” (David Streitfeld, The New York Times)
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
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