Books About Censorship

Banned Together

Our Fight for Readers' Rights

By: Ashley Hope Pérez
Length: TBA

A dazzling YA anthology that spotlights the transformative power of books while equipping teens to fight for the freedom to read, featuring the voices of 15 diverse, award-winning authors and illustrators.

Books are disappearing from shelves across the country.

What does this mean for authors, illustrators, and—most crucially—for young... Read more

Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books

A Novel

By: Kirsten Miller
Narrated by: January LaVoy
Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

“Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books isn’t just a powerful, timely story about the dangers of censorship and the harm it does to individuals, families and entire communities. It is also a witty, poignant story about how books can save and heal individuals, families and entire communities. Read more

The Great Banned-Books Bake Sale

By: Aya Khalil
Narrated by: Dalia Ramahi
Length: 18 minutes

Upon learning that the books with kids who look like her have been banned by her school district, Kanzi descends into fear and helplessness. But her classmates support her, and together—with their teacher’s help—they hatch a plan to hold a bake sale and use the proceeds to buy diverse books to donate to libraries. The event is a big success: the... Read more

What the Fact?

Finding the Truth in All the Noise

By: Seema Yasmin
Narrated by: Seema Yasmin
Length: 9 hours 25 minutes

“For anyone feeling overwhelmed by the plethora of misinformation, disinformation, falsehoods, and other methods of muddling reality, this book is a fantastic resource. In accessible, conversational language, rife with examples real and hypothetical, Dr. Seema Yasmin breaks down the different types of bad info, how it spreads, why it spreads, and... Read more

This Book Won't Burn

By: Samira Ahmed
Narrated by: Kausar Mohammed
Length: 10 hours 33 minutes

★ “[Ahmed] employs high stakes, increasing tensions, romantic near-misses, and adult hypocrisy to powerful effect.” –Publisher's Weekly, starred review

From the New York Times bestselling author of Internment comes a timely and gripping social-suspense novel about book banning, activism, and standing up for what you believe. 

After her dad... Read more

That Librarian

The Fight Against Book Banning in America

By: Amanda Jones
Narrated by: Amanda Jones
Length: 9 hours 56 minutes

“This incredible memoir is a raw and honest account of Amanda Jones’s struggle as a librarian standing up for freedom of speech in her community. After voicing her concerns about book censorship at a local public hearing, she is harshly vilified and targeted, which was painful to read at some points but very necessary. I deeply admire Jones for... Read more

Free Speech

A History from Socrates to Social Media

By: Jacob Mchangama
Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
Length: 13 hours 24 minutes

A global history of free speech, from the ancient world to todayHailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat.In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the... Read more

Animal Farm

By: George Orwell
Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
Length: 3 hours 11 minutes

Soon to be an animated film adaptation produced and directed by Andy Serkis George Orwell’s classic satire of the Russian Revolution has become an intimate part of our contemporary culture, with its treatment of democratic, fascist, and socialist ideals through an animal fable.The animals of Mr. Jones’s Manor Farm are overworked, mistreated, and... Read more

Answers in the Pages

By: David Levithan
Narrated by: Christopher Gebauer, Vikas Adam & Oliver Wyman
Length: 4 hours 13 minutes

“Three stories intertwine to create a masterpiece highlighting the importance of queer book representation in schools, and the dangers of book banning. David Levithan had me hooked from the first sentence and sighing with hope at the last. I fell in love with the sweet characters, becoming invested in their quirks and lives. A celebration of... Read more

Reading Lolita in Tehran

A Memoir in Books

By: Azar Nafisi
Narrated by: Azar Nafisi
Length: 17 hours 35 minutes

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor... Read more

Ban This Book

By: Alan Gratz
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 5 hours 17 minutes

An inspiring tale of a fourth-grader who fights back when her favorite book is banned from the school library―by starting her own illegal locker libraryIt all started the day Amy Anne Ollinger tried to check out her favorite book in the whole world, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, from the school library. That’s when Mrs.... Read more

Property of the Rebel Librarian

By: Allison Varnes
Narrated by: Monika Felice Smith
Length: 5 hours 59 minutes

Celebrate the freedom to read with this timely, empowering middle-grade debut about a girl who fights back against banned books in the spirit of The View from Saturday or Frindle.

When twelve-year-old June Harper's parents discover what they deem an inappropriate library book, they take strict parenting to a whole new level. And everything June... Read more

The Last Book in the Universe

By: Rodman Philbrick
Narrated by: Jeremy Davies
Length: 4 hours 24 minutes

This fast-paced action novel is set in a future where the world has been almost destroyed. Like the award-winning novel Freak the Mighty, this is Philbrick at his very best.

It's the story of an epileptic teenager nicknamed Spaz, who begins the heroic fight to bring human intelligence back to the planet. In a world where most people are plugged... Read more

Dangerous Ideas

A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News

By: Eric Berkowitz
Narrated by: Tim Campbell
Length: 10 hours 38 minutes

A fascinating examination of how restricting speech has continuously shaped our culture, and how censorship is used as a tool to prop up authorities and maintain class and gender disparities

Through compelling narrative, historian Eric Berkowitz reveals how drastically censorship has shaped our modern society. More than just a history of... Read more

Burning the Books

A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

By: Richard Ovenden
Narrated by: Simon Slater
Length: 9 hours 48 minutes

In Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts and the broader themes... Read more

Attack of the Black Rectangles

By: A. S. King
Narrated by: Pete Cross, Gretchen Bender, Amy Sarig King & Jane Yolen
Length: 5 hours 19 minutes

Award-winning author Amy Sarig King takes on censorship and intolerance in a novel she was born to write.When Mac first opens his classroom copy of Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic and finds some words blacked out, he thinks it must be a mistake. But then when he and his friends discover what the missing words are, he's outraged.Someone in... Read more