Who Controls What Books You Can Read?.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

SOMEONE GAVE MARGARET Atwood a flamethrower.

The gray-haired author has become a patron saint for a certain kind of dystopian apocalypticism. No protest is complete these days without at least a few women in the red robes and white bonnets of The Handmaid's Tale, her clouded portrait of an authoritarian society built around controlling conscience and fertility. "The Handmaid's Tale has been banned many times--sometimes by whole countries, such as Portugal and Spain in the days of Salazar and the Francoists," Atwood notes, "sometimes by school boards, sometimes by libraries."

All of which made her the perfect subject for a stunt to raise money for PEN America, a nonprofit that fights literary censorship: She took a blowtorch to a custom-made fireproof edition of her most famous work, which would later be put up for auction by Sotheby's.

Book burnings have long been popular with those who would seize and hold power, from the Catholic Church (page 26) to Josef Stalin (page 37). Kings, fascists, and communists alike have warmed their hands over literary bonfires. But rarely in 2022 America do book bans take the incendiary form of our Ray Bradbury-fueled (page 34) fever dreams.

Yet controversy over book bans has flared up nonetheless, with local and state elections won or lost over which books will be stocked in libraries or taught in schools (page 22)--a newly invigorated front in a long-running culture war.

THE AMERICAN LIBRARY Association (ALA), another anti-censorship organization, keeps lists of what it calls "challenged books"--books that a person or group has tried to remove from or restrict access to in schools or libraries. A "banned book" is one where that removal is successful.

By the ALA's reckoning, challenges and bans are way up, setting a 20-year record. The organization recorded 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021, targeting more than 1,500 different titles. The list is far from exhaustive, assembled as it is from media reports and from folks who contact the organization directly. This produces an odd chicken-and-egg problem, where the more politically agitated people are about book bannings, the more incidents they will report as book bannings, and the more there will appear to be.

The books that make the ALA annual top 10 list vary from year to year, but they comprise a consistent mix: classics that deal with mature themes--Beloved (page 44) and the Bible--books that contain slurs or other...