 "Areopagitica," by John Milton (1644) | Over the last two years of book-banning hysteria, I've turned again and again to John Milton's "Areopagitica." (That may be the most pretentious sentence I've ever written, but I can't help myself.) Milton released this pamphlet in 1644 – more than 20 years before "Paradise Lost." It's a wide-ranging critique of a law that required authors to get pre-approval from the government for anything they wanted to publish. Over the centuries, "Areopagitica" has come to be seen as one of the greatest defenses of free expression ever written. These days, when the air smells thick with the soot of burning books, Milton's wisdom sounds especially relevant. Among the many arguments Milton raises against trying to regulate "the multitude of books" to control people's minds is that it's futile. "Banish all objects of lust," he writes, "shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercis'd in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste." The futility of book banning to suppress or even eradicate sexual identity has been confirmed once again. Despite – or, I would say, because of – a right-wing campaign against LGBTQ books, the popularity of LGBTQ titles has soared over the last of couple years. Indeed, NPD reports this month that sales doubled between 2020 and 2021, and since the start of this year, sales have increased another 39 percent. Pouring salt on conservatives' stigmata, the largest increases in LGBTQ fiction last year were in books for young adults. Digging deeper into the data, NPD books analyst Kristen McLean discovered that the preponderance of growth is taking place largely among fiction books from popular categories such as romance, fantasy and graphic novels with secondary LGBTQ characters and themes. "I think these numbers reflect a kind of normalization," McLean said. "What was once considered a niche area of publishing is now becoming mainstream. Just like the diverse world it reflects, LGBTQ fiction is woven into all parts of the fiction landscape." For more information about this complex subject, sign up to watch "Censored Authors Speak: Fourth of July and the Freedom to Read," a panel discussion co-sponsored by We Need Diverse Books and EveryLibrary on Wed, June 29, at 8:00 p.m. EDT (free, but you can register here).  Oni Press; Bloomsbury (Photo illustration by Ron Charles/The Washington Post) | Tommy Altman's attack on books wasn't enough to help him win the Republican nomination for Virginia's 2nd congressional district on Tuesday. But despite the death of his political campaign, Altman's cynical assault on freedom of expression is still lumbering along, a zombie crusade looking for braaaaaains. Last month, you may remember, Altman and Virginia Del. Timothy Anderson (R-Virginia Beach) successfully petitioned a judge to find probable cause that two books they don't like are "obscene for unrestricted viewing by minors." They then asked Judge Pamela Baskervill to issue a temporary restraining order against Barnes & Noble, forbidding the sale of "Gender Queer," an illustrated memoir by Maia Kobabe, and "A Court of Mist and Fury," a fantasy novel by Sarah J. Maas (story). B&N answered the court's request for comment with a carefully phrased letter that strained to bring the judge up to date on 20th-century jurisprudence without using the technical legal phrase, "What the &$#! are you thinking?" "There was a time in American history, before the development of contemporary First Amendment doctrine, when best-selling and critically-acclaimed books faced the risk of being declared obscene," the B&N attorneys explained. "But no mainstream books by established publishers have been found to be obscene in the past sixty years." In their formal response to the court last week, B&N raised several constitutional objections and noted that "no provision of Virginia law authorizes a preemptive ruling that the books at issue are 'obscene for unrestricted viewing by minors.'" Like most of the book banners storming school board and library board meetings lately, Altman and Anderson base their complaint on isolated words and images in these books, but for decades the Supreme Court has ruled that works of literature must be judged "as a whole," not stripped down to a few dirty parts that might offend "the most susceptible person." (Of course, given this week's radical upheavals, who knows what the new Supreme Court might decide rifle-wielding handmaids can read?) Oni Press, the publisher of "Gender Queer," declined my request for comment, but the company clearly doesn't feel intimidated by this legal challenge. On July 5, a "deluxe" hardcover version of "Gender Queer" will be released with a new cover and some new artwork, along with a foreword by cartoonist ND Stevenson and an afterword by Kobabe. For the moment, Americans are still free to publish and read what they want. If, like me, you've missed hanging around your favorite indie bookstore during the pandemic, you must make a cup of tea and watch "Hello, Bookstore." Directed and photographed by A.B. Zax, this charmingly dusty documentary places us inside the capacious world of Matt Tannenbaum. Since 1976, Tannenbaum has run The Bookstore, a legendary indie in Lenox, Mass. Over the decades, he's become both a master seller of literature and a quirky literary character himself. "I am not a businessman," he insists beneath a mane of curly gray hair. "I've always been doing it by the seat of my pants. I'm like the old guy shuffling along." Don't believe it. He's irresistibly charming – always ready with a witty story or a line from Flaubert or a hundred other writers. "Fiction is the filter through which I see the world," he says. Loitering along without a care, "Hello, Bookstore" shows Tannenbaum chatting with customers, finding a book he knows they'll love and recalling chance encounters with Martha Graham, Tom Stoppard and Patti Smith. "I really learned like a young child learns through his limbs," he says. "I learned my trade viscerally." But about an hour into the documentary, the pandemic strikes and Tannenbaum realizes the wolf is at the door. He owes New York publishers so much money that they won't send him any more books, and customers have vanished. In a last-ditch effort, he sends out an SOS to SOB (Save Our Bookstore). Will the good readers of Lenox answer this call for help? There is probably not an instrument sensitive enough to detect the amplitude of drama in this gentle film, but that's not the point. Sit back and relax until you hear the closing words of Jane Smiley: "It's hard to leave a bookstore any day of the year . . . because a bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them." "Hello, Bookstore" has been playing in a few select theaters around the country, but you can stream it starting June 27 (information).  Former Washington Post managing editor Tracy Grant is the new editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Photo by Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) | Long before he was blasting into space or trying to buy Twitter, Elon Musk read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Encyclopedias were digestible 40 years ago," he once told an interviewer. Encyclopedias were holdable 40 years ago, too. Many of you will remember those stately volumes, gold-stamped, standing at regal attention across several shelves in the living room, ready at a moment's notice to explain the habitat of Aardvarks or the history of Zweibrucken. Such knowledge didn't come cheap: In 2012, the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica cost $1,395, but lots of families thought it was a worthy educational investment. Alas, the internet eventually dissolved all those glossy volumes and sent their content into the ether. A decade has passed since the Encyclopaedia Britannica went out of print — ending an august legacy that stretched back to 1768. But faced with an existential crisis, Encyclopaedia Britannica evolved — moving from CDs to DVDs to the Web. It was a brutal transition that demanded a complete overhaul of the company's business model and editorial process: The old sales force was abandoned; content updates shifted from yearly to hourly. While Wikipedia trumpeted the benefits of universal contributions and offered its content gratis, Britannica hired the world's experts and charged a fee. It was a classic example of the difficulty of competing with free (See: Death of newspapers). These days, Encyclopaedia Britannica maintains a free version and a paid premium version. I'm mentioning all this because Encyclopaedia Britannica just got a new editor in chief who's up for the challenges and the opportunities that lie ahead: former Washington Post managing editor Tracy Grant. We're devastated, but our loss is the world's gain. Tracy is a terrific manager with boundless curiosity and a great sense of humor. During her decades-long career at The Post, she worked as a copy editor, a graphics editor, a business editor, a features editor and then became one of our managing editors during the paper's rapid online expansion. "Every day in The Post newsroom, I would be part of conversations about how we could provide readers with the context, the history, the background they need to fully understand the world around them," Tracy tells me. "That's everything from history and geography to pop culture and health. And that perfectly describes what Britannica has to offer. But today, when trusted information sources can be hard to come by, Britannica has a role to play that is as important as any it has played in its 254-year history. We are in a moment to redefine how verified knowledge is shared for the rest of the 21st century, and Britannica needs to be the cornerstone of that new definition."  Believer, No. 139, March/April 2022 | The Believer has repeatedly tested our belief in resurrection, but now it's this close to another comeback. The bimonthly journal was started in 2003 at McSweeney's, Dave Eggers's cooler-than-cool publishing house. Over the years it's featured work by Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Derek Walcott, Karen Russell and many once unknown writers who are now marquee names too. The Believer's audience was always – in Milton's words – "fit . . . though few," but it was beloved in the general way that literary people love publications they're not willing to pay for. When its finances became untenable, McSweeney's sold the journal to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where it seemed to thrive for a while before the new editor exposed himself during a Zoom meeting and the magazine was sold off again — this time to something called Paradise Media, which also owns the Sex Toy Collective. (No, I'm not making this up.) The literati was not pleased, but all's well that ends well. This spring McSweeney's bought the Believer back – reportedly at a very charitable discount. Now the prodigal magazine is trying to raise money on Kickstarter to secure its future. Yesterday, the campaign surpassed its goal of $275,000, but there's still time before the end of the month to add your contribution, so why not help out? You can look forward to "a special homecoming issue" in November and a 20th anniversary celebration next year. Believe.  (Gallery 13) | Vladimir Putin's atrocities in Ukraine are all the more tragic for being a grim replay of Joseph Stalin's horrific crimes. "The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule," by the Italian artist Igort, offers a unique exploration of that history. First published in Europe as two separate books, they were released in a single volume in the U.S. in 2016 with an English translation by Jamie Richards. Based on Igort's interviews with survivors and excerpts from official reports, "The Ukrainian Notebooks" describes the Holodomor, a famine in 1932 and '33 that Stalin used to crush resistance. "The Ukrainian border was closed," Igort writes with an eerie echo of today. "Circulating between regions was forbidden, and the grain reserves of millions of peasants were confiscated." Millions of people went hungry, turned to cannibalism and perished. "It was a sad world," a woman remembers, "that world where one person's death brought hope to another." Igort's stark text and hauntingly grim illustrations in a muted palette convey this horror with incredible power. The second part, "The Russian Notebooks," presents Igort's investigation into the life and murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who bravely reported on the Second Chechen War. Like other critics of Putin, she was poisoned and, when that didn't work, shot to death in 2006. "Anna was infused with the ethical sense that spills out of the pages of 19th-century Russian literature," Igort writes. "Anna's was a better Russia, and perhaps what we have learned from her is the need to remember, to not turn a blind eye or look the other way, to not accept prepackaged truths but to defend everyday values no matter what, the values that make us, after all, human." If you missed this unique book when it came out or you thought it was just a historical curiosity, take a look now. Current events have made it tragically relevant.  Two Dollar Radio; Penguin; Henry Holt; Quill Tree Books; Basic Books | This week's literary awards and honors: - Kalani Pickhart's terrific debut novel about Ukraine, "I Will Die in a Foreign Land," won the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library (review). This $10,000 prize is conferred on the best novel or collection of short stories by a writer age 35 or younger.
- "Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688," by Clare Jackson, won the Wolfson Prize, worth about $65,000, for the best history book published in the U.K.
- Angeline Boulley, the author of "Firekeeper's Daughter," and Rajani LaRocca, the author of "Red, White, and Whole," accepted Walter Dean Myers Awards at a ceremony yesterday in Washington. The Walters recognize the year's best children's literature that "features diverse main characters and addresses diversity in a meaningful way." You can watch the awards ceremony and a symposium about book banning's impact on diverse children's literature here.
- George Chauncey won the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity at the Library of Congress. The prize, worth a cool $500,000, recognizes a writer whose scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has shaped public affairs and civil society. Chauncey, a history professor at Columbia University, is the author of "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940" and other influential works. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said, "Professor Chauncey's trailblazing career gave us all better insight into, and understanding of, the LGBTQ+ community and history. His work that helped transform our nation's attitudes and laws, epitomizes the Kluge Center's mission to support research at the intersection of the humanities and public policy."
 (Courtesy of Play On Podcasts) | Lend me your ears: Today, Play On launches "Twelfth Night," the latest in its series of Shakespeare adaptations. These enchanting radio dramas are based on new "translations" commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and published by ACMRS Press. This "Twelfth Night" was written by Alison Carey and stars Amy Brenneman ("The Leftovers") and Tramell Tillman ("Severance"). The Oregon theater's adaptations stay close to Shakespeare's text, while smoothing out the knottiest passages and subtly modernizing the most obscure Renaissance diction. With all its transgressive comedy about gender fluidity and sexual ambiguity, "Twelfth Night" is surprisingly relevant to the culture war roiling America today. Texans beware: Shakespeare's dirty jokes are much clearer in this adaptation! If music be the food of love, play on! (listen) If you're struggling to place that quotation – or anything about the Bard – check out the online catalog just launched by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Designed for scholars but readily usable by everyday enthusiasts, this new catalog gives easy access to the world's largest Shakespeare collection – including links to high-resolution images in the Folger's database. As somebody once said, "Come, and take choice of all my library."  Milkweed Editions | On Wednesday, Washington Post employees received an email from our chief Human Resources officer admonishing us to come into the office at least three days a week. Coincidentally, I've been reading Ryann Stevenson's debut collection, "Human Resources," which includes this poem that captures the last two years so well: Work From Home Before the morning chill burns off
I'm in front of my computer screen and somebody on the internet needs me
to look at them. Working from home is just like working in outer space, I imagine.
I go to the bathroom just to go somewhere. I hear my neighbors
through the wall, and my heart jumps— there are others. Their faucet runs.
They're in there together, laughing. I return to my workspace and my coffee needs to be reheated
again. Because my mother raised me to outlive her, I used to stand in another room,
away from the microwave, but now that I've taken to the practice of mindfulness
I leave my hand on its door handle and pay attention, like my niece when she plays
Microwave, zapping soda cans in her plastic appliance labeled Just Like Home.
The waves pass through me— my soft tissue lighting up like phantom vibrations
in a dead landline. Until the sun goes down I orbit between my workspace, bathroom, kitchen, bed,
taking conference calls about artificial intelligence. First order of business is to define what intelligence is,
then how to avoid a dystopian eventuality. We hold our phones away from our ears,
speakers on high, because we all read the same headline about radiation.
When somebody's dog barks near the phone somebody else's dog barks back.
This is the best part of my day. From "Human Resources," by Ryann Stevenson (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by Ryann Stevenson. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.  Dawn, Madeline, Elissa, Ron Sr., Sandra and Ron Charles playing Pun Intended. (Ron Charles/The Washington Post) | After so many months of rattling around alone, Dawn and I are thrilled to have a full house. Both our daughters are staying with us – though just for a few more days – and my folks have come down from New Hampshire for the weekend. Yes, this required some nuclear-powered home cleaning, but it was worth the effort for our rousing games of Pun Intended. Meanwhile, send any questions or comments about our book coverage to ron.charles@washpost.com. You can read last week's issue here. Please tell friends who might enjoy this free newsletter that they can subscribe by clicking here.
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