In recognition of the end of Banned Books Week, some of the staff and columnists of PRoB share some meditations on their own favorite works that have been legally challenged.
Shelly Shi: The Kite Runner operates as a powerful exercise in cross-cultural rhetoric, deploying intimate narratives to challenge and complicate Western audiences’ relationship with Afghanistan and its diaspora. Hosseini’s strategic use of first-person narration creates an identificatory relationship between reader and narrator—we inhabit Amir’s privileged, educated perspective, which becomes the very site of the novel’s moral interrogation. The text’s rhetorical efficacy lies in how it refuses the flattening binaries of victim/oppressor or East/West, instead positioning readers within the uncomfortable interiority of complicity. Through Amir and Hassan’s relationship, Hosseini constructs a sustained argument about structural inequality, ethnic prejudice, and the performance of class privilege, all while maintaining the affective pull of childhood friendship and loss. The kite itself functions as a multivalent symbol—freedom, competition, severed connections—that anchors the novel’s exploration of guilt and attempted redemption.
What makes this text rhetorically significant, particularly in the context of censorship debates, is its refusal to sanitize trauma in service of palatability. The novel’s graphic depictions of violence and sexual assault function not as spectacle but as ethical intervention—they disrupt the aesthetic distance that allows audiences to consume suffering without confrontation. This rhetorical choice, of course, generates the very controversies that place it on banned books lists. Yet the text’s presence in contemporary discourse shows its success in shifting conversations about Afghanistan from geopolitical abstraction to human particularity. The Kite Runner demonstrates literature’s capacity to function as epideictic rhetoric: it doesn’t merely tell a story but works to reshape communal values around empathy, accountability, and the ethics of witness.
Asia Thompson: One of my favorite books of all time is Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, for its accurate perception of identity and love that I can apply to my own life, fifty years after its publication. Does it surprise me that it’s a banned book? No. Is it highly disappointing that a book, and so many books like it, are subjected to the unfair and ridiculous subjugation of what becomes “banned or not”? Yes. The Bluest Eye offers so much complexity and depth in understanding the idea of love and benign love by those around you, while dealing with sexism, sexual harm, and racism. To me, the book is a reflection of the struggle between beauty and Blackness, and it offers a newfound understanding of who you are, where you are, and who you want to be after reading the book. Morrison’s work has always been transformative and impactful, but The Bluest Eye truly offers a unique perspective as a living Black little girl in a world that is not as sensitive, kind, or forgiving as it should be.
Sarah Fleming Steinberg: Among the far too many banned books, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee stands out as my personal favorite. First encountered in high school, this novel has held a special place in my heart ever since. The character of Atticus Finch made such a profound impression that I once dreamed of naming my first child after him — perhaps it was the Gregory Peck of it all.
What makes this American classic so enduring is its exploration of deep-rooted racial issues that remain relevant today, while also addressing feminist perspectives and mental health concerns. Each time I revisit this book, which is often, I discover something new. It masterfully balances hope and realism, examining themes of family, otherness, and national identity. This novel’s universal appeal lies in its ability to offer something meaningful for every reader, providing valuable lessons that resonate across generations.
Ed Simon: When I was a freshman in college, I took a purple ball-point pen and my hi-top Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars and wrote in careful script around the white rubber which separated the black canvas from the sole of the sneakers the first line of Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 Beat classic Howl. “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” and, well, you probably know the rest. What can I say? I also had an affectation for moleskine notebooks and American Spirit cigarettes. Cringe aside, and despite the sometimes-awful bevy of verse which Ginsberg was capable of, I still have a soft-spot for Howl with its evocative, unspooling, prophetic lines; the invocation of the hungry and desperate, the beautiful and the beatified. Those who are “starving hysterical naked” while “looking for an angry fix.” To hear the poet recite at the Six Gallery Reading would be as if listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 or Dylan going electric at Newport in 1965 – a primordial genesis, a big bang. There was a trial of course; the queer, Jewish, anarchist Ginsberg charged with obscenity in San Francisco and indicted alongside City Books owner (and fellow poet) Lawrence Ferrlinghetti, though they were successfully defended by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“The ‘Howl’ that was heard around the world wasn’t seized… just because it was judged obscene by the cops,” writes Ferlinghetti in an essay from Bill Morgan and Nancy Peters’ collection Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression, “but because it attacked the bare roots of our dominant culture, the very Moloch at the heart of our consumer society.” A crackle of danger still permeates Ginsberg’s words, as all true words must. In a typically Orwellian gambit, the current administration in the United States released a presidential memo less than two weeks ago entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” which creates a category of thought-crime that includes positions which are judged to be anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, or anti-American (the religion of the executive is, of course, nothing less than unfettered capitalism and avarice). If ever there was a need for prophecy to denounce these new Molochs which oppress us, it’s now. “America when will you be angelic?” asked Ginsberg in another poem, “When will you be worthy?” Now when I look back on those inked-up sneakers I feel less a sense of youthful embarrassment than the feeling of Ginsberg’s continuing prescience.
Shanzeh Afzal: One of my favorite challenged books is Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction by Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer, novelist, and activist whose work asks questions of justice, nationalism, and freedom in contemporary India. I first read this book in my when I was an undergraduate student, in an introductory course on Cultural Studies, and I revisit it often, especially the first essay “In what language does rain fall over tormented cities” where she contrasts the language of power used to justify war, nationalism, and capitalism, with the language of resistance and empathy found in art and literature. Roy first gained international acclaim with her novel The God of Small Things, but over the years she has become an unflinching political essayist and one of India’s most vocal critics of state power.
Azadi is a collection of essays written that reflects her engagement with the political and moral crises facing the country, from the rise of Hindu nationalism and politics to the silencing of journalists, students, and activists. The title itself, meaning “freedom” in Hindi, becomes a rallying cry for those resisting oppression in all its various shapes and forms. Her writings have made her a frequent target of outrage and censorship, as her criticism of state violence is often labeled “anti-national.” This book grapples with questions of state censorship, and has also been banned, making it a perfect pick for banned books week.
I value this book for its fearless commitment to questioning the nature of freedom, and it has made me ask myself what it means to be free when our lives are so heavily controlled by oppressive capitalist systems and its various tentacles.
Mason Stockstill: The Case for Loving: The Fight for Interracial Marriage
This is a children’s book about the family behind the landmark Supreme Court case that overturned laws preventing marriage between partners of different races. Despite the right to marry outside of one’s race being settled U.S. law, and morally acceptable in the eyes of all but the most extremist denizens of our nation’s embarrassing racist fringes, this work was banned from school libraries by the Central York School District in 2021, after the school board there decided to outlaw a huge swath of books that had previously been labeled as antiracist and/or diverse. I’m not sure what is more pernicious: the idea of government censors poring over every page of every novel or book of nonfiction, comparing words and thoughts contained therein to a rubric of acceptable and anathema utterances; or the notion that those same martinets would simply grab a list of books purported to represent an idea they have been led to oppose and then unthinkingly machete-chop them from circulation. Fortunately, after protests from the district’s students, the board reversed its decision. Perhaps the children really are the future.
Sam Lemley: On March 5, 1616, the Vatican body responsible for maintaining the Index of Prohibited Books declared the heliocentric theory “false and contrary to Holy Scripture.” Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) was placed on the Index “until corrected” — an order that applied to the first edition, printed in Nuremberg in 1543, the second of 1566, and to all books that promulgated Copernican ideas.
The copy of the first edition at Carnegie Mellon University’s Posner Center for Special Collections, where I work, shows how this order was enforced. In the crucial chapter of Copernicus’s text — where the Polish astronomer outlines and illustrates his theory of a sun-centered cosmos — we find evidence of censorship: the chapter title is underlined and above it is written a new title that opens with the word “hypothesis,” reducing Copernicus’s thoroughgoing cosmology to a mathematical toy.
But the redaction seems odd, accustomed as we are to stories of books — or authors — burned for promoting interdicted thought. What strikes us is its restraint; it is more like annotation than expurgation, showing a reluctance to destroy or even disfigure the book while fundamentally changing its meaning. What’s more, the barely redacted line undermines the censor’s aim: it draws attention to what it ought to conceal.
The book’s survival meanwhile — five centuries after its printing, four after its censorship — attests to radical thought’s resilience. And the earth still moves around the sun.
