A lively, accessible survey of literary censorship through the ages.

The freedom to read is under attack. There are, today, more efforts to ban books from libraries than ever before. The supposed "dangers" posed by books including The Handmaid's Tale, Gender Queer, Huckleberry Finn, and the works of Dr. Seuss—leading children down a path of sexual deviance, or harming them with racist language or non-inclusive narratives—fuel the puritanical zeal of De Santis Republicans and progressive educators alike. On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy argues that today's culture warriors proceed from a misunderstanding of literature as instrumental to the pursuit of their ideological agendas. In treating libraries as sites of contagion and exposure, censors are warping our children's relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is cancellation or outright expurgation.

On Book Banning provides a lively, accessible survey of literary censorship through the ages—from the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome, to the Catholic Church's attempts to tamp down religious dissent and scientific innovation, to state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ literature in the 1980s and beyond. Throughout, Ira Wells demonstrates how today's book bans stem from the ineradicable human impulse toward social control. In a whistle-stop tour of landmark legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, we discover that the freedom to read and publish is the aberration in human history, and that censorship and restriction have been the rule. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who reject the conflation of art and propaganda, for whom books remain sacred vessels of our shared humanity, and who will always insist upon reading for ourselves.

Ira Wells is an assistant professor of literature at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, The Walrus, Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Quarterly, and many other publications.

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Praise for On Book Banning

"Beneath the elegant prose of this small volume lies a vast urgency and passion about language, books, and human consciousness. The hot-button political debates—about freedom of thought and the value of open access, and the depredations of governments and activists to control both—are set against a background of deep yearning for connection between minds. Wells has given us a wise and powerful example of that very thing."

—Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations

Praise for Norman Jewison: A Director's Life

"Norman Jewison: A Director's Life is] a fascinating story told with verve and authority."

—Toronto Star

"To read Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life, is to wonder why this most consequential of directors wasn’t better known. A big thanks to Ira Wells for giving biography treatment to a major Hollywood creator who strangely never became a legend.”

—Forbes

“Ira Wells makes the persuasive case that Jewison deserves more fame than he has received, and along the way delivers a rollicking tale of Hollywood during Jewison’s most active years and plenty of backstage trivia.”

—Air Mail

“[A]n exhaustively researched look at the career of the country's most prolific, but least understood, filmmaker. The book is an ambitious, and frequently essential, endeavour.”

—Globe and Mail

“A thoroughly enjoyable and detailed look at a memorable life in film.”

—Library Journal