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Book-banning cries get weirder

The FBI has been forwarded a “Values in Education” complaint that assigning books by Wright, Morrison and Vonnegut violates laws against distribution of porn to minors.

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How an obscene work becomes a classic

Looking back on the Madame Bovary trial, and the banning of Lolita, Ulysses, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it’s easy to feel superior to the philistines who didn’t recognize these literary works as high art. (Flaubert disséquant Madame Bovary caricature, at right, found here.) But Elizabeth Ladenson argues in Dirt for Art’s Sake that each age, including ours, is censorious in . . .

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Shepping nachas

Everybody please congratulate my dear friend Mark Sarvas, whose first novel, Harry, Revised, has been picked up by Bloomsbury for publication in 2008.

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Presumptively classified

Seventeen poems by Guantánamo Bay detainees will be published later this year. Many other poems won’t be included, though; the Pentagon refuses to declassify them.

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