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Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: J.D. Salinger, Jenna Krajeski, Ligaya Mishan, Louis Menand, newyorker.com, Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron
Benjamin Chambers writes:
The American Library Association is celebrating banned books this week. Trust the Brits to come through with élan, by which I mean they've created a quiz, about which, more anon. High time, I thought, for Emdashes to create a quiz of its own: which New Yorker authors have been banned most often?
Top of the list would have to be J.D. Salinger, for Catcher in the Rye (which I gather TNY rejected) and of course Vladimir Nabokov, for Lolita. (Check out William Styron's 1995 account of why Random House refused to publish it.) Who else should be on the list?
Once you finish with our quiz, head on over to the Guardian, and take theirs. First, though, you might want to bone up by learning more about the top 10 books that Americans tried most frequently to remove from library shelves in 2007. From there, you can also learn which were the top 10 most-frequently challenged books of this century, which is almost a two-for-one, really, because all but 3 of those books were also the most-frequently-challenged books of the 1990s. (Do authors no longer want to be banned in Boston?)
The quiz was posted by the Guardian, and it has at least one UK-centric question on it: "Why did a UK exam board remove Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Education for Leisure' from the GCSE syllabus?"
This is what's known in common parlance as a rigged game, so I'm going to even the odds—you can find the poem in question below this article covering the hullabaloo. (Note that somebody complained about the poem because of its "description of a goldfish being flushed down the toilet".) Apparently, Duffy replied to the official stricture with another poem, which left its target feeling "gobsmacked." Wish poets had that kind of power in this country.
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Emdashes, founded December 2004, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.
We welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.
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This site is neither owned nor operated by The New Yorker magazine or Condé Nast Publications.
A few clips
- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Review: Does The New Republic's recent redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands (for Print)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
Tell me more
They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.
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Comments
i still find myself laughing when people want to ban 'fahrenheit 451'.... proving far too often, they don't read what they want banned....