Casualties of war: Poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s debut novel focuses on the girls kidnapped by the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army
Otok Bitek uses local folklore as a metaphorical way of bringing the girls' experience into relief.
How do we get people to care about the arts? In The Audacity of Relevance, Alex Sarian has some ideas
It's not the idea of relevance itself that gives one pause, so much as where Sarian chooses to place the emphasis.
Internationally bestselling author Louise Penny announces she will not travel to the U.S. due to tariff war
Penny pointed out that her decision to boycott the U.S. was not a reflection on the American public or her readers, but on the actions of the government in power.
John Ford and Clyde Barrow on the road to Key West: The rugged melancholy of Michael Blouin’s Hard Electric
These are not a young man's verses; they are the ruminations of someone in the twilight of middle-age.
Goodreads and prior restraint: Bloom Books pulls an upcoming romance novel after criticism from early readers
Most often, what these censorious online voices demonstrate is not moral rectitude but a complete inability to understand how to read fiction.
Freedom to Read Week 2025: The Washington Post vs. Jeff Bezos
If a billionaire is in a position to dictate how the media does its job, there is no free press to speak of.
Walking the tightrope: Mélikah Abeldmoumen uses the friendship between James Baldwin and William Styron to comment on race, writing, and appropriation
The text is a valuable examination of certain points of dissension or disagreement ongoing in our culture.
Freedom to Read Week 2025: Ulysses by James Joyce
Joyce's novel is now widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
Freedom to Read Week 2025: When Everything Feels Like the Movies by Raziel Reid
Barbara Kay took to the pages of the National Post to complain about the government having "wasted tax dollars on this values-void novel."
Freedom to Read Week 2025: On the enduring importance of standing up against attempts to suppress books
As we are witnessing on a global scale, it is all too easy to lose the essential freedoms we in a democratic society take for granted.