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    A Year Among My Fellow Banned Writers

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    This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.Turning Point: More than 10,000 books were targeted for removal from school shelves in the United States in the 2023-2024 academic year.As a kid, I cataloged the books I read each year in a three-ring notebook. I read lots of books, not all of them favorites, but I was proud to read and review each one for my own pleasure, from fairy tales to books on the lives of saints. Even if I didn’t like a tome, I read it anyway. Every book will teach you something, if you let it.Now, as I near 70 years of age, I’ve made it a goal to read books that have recently been targeted for bans in South Texas public schools. In the spring, a church group approached school boards in the Rio Grande Valley and brought certain titles to their attention, saying that some of the content in the books was “extremely vulgar and offensive.” The group specified reasons for requesting each book’s expulsion, though some of the themes it cited — sexual abuse and parental violence — are also found in the pages of the Bible, which could also be labeled offensive if not read in context. The church group didn’t use the word “ban” — they preferred that officials “willingly remove” these books. This raised my curiosity.Earlier this year I thought I would make the group’s list my summer reading project, but with 676 titles to get through, I had to extend my goal beyond one season.A display featuring books that have faced bans at The Lynx bookstore in Gainesville, Fla. Lauren Groff, the best-selling author, and her husband had toyed with the idea of opening The Lynx for more than a decade and said that mounting bans and challenges to books, particularly in Florida, pushed them to do it.Dustin Miller for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hal Lindsey, Author of ‘The Late, Great Planet Earth,’ Dies at 95

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      In that 1970 book and others he wrote of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.Hal Lindsey, a onetime Mississippi Delta tugboat captain who became a campus preacher and improbably vaulted to fame and riches by writing that the world would soon end with natural catastrophes and ruinous wars, followed by the return of Jesus Christ, died on Monday at his home. He was 95.His death was announced on his website. The announcement did not specify where he lived.Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.An editor at Bantam Books thought the book, Mr. Lindsey’s first, had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold around 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages.If you are reading this, Mr. Lindsey’s doomsday predictions have not come true, and his prophesies of imminent end-of-the-world events seem less credible with each passing day. Yet Mr. Lindsey was indeed a harbinger — of a movement he helped create.“Hal Lindsey is one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of contemporary prophecy belief,” Paul S. Boyer, a historian who specialized in the role of religion in American life, wrote several years before his own death in 2012. While Mr. Boyer saw the book as neither profound nor truly avant-garde, he wrote that its author “represents another one of those moments of breakthrough, when interest in Bible prophecy spills out beyond just the ranks of the true believers and becomes a broader cultural phenomenon.”The Middle East, and Israel in particular, were central to Mr. Lindsey’s predictions. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” was published just three years after Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Mr. Lindsey was on safe ground in predicting that Israel’s victory would not bring peace, but he envisioned events far worse than the violence and tensions that plague the region.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      100 Notable Books of 2024

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      If you read Ferris’s original 2017 graphic novel, you can’t forget it: a beguiling, haunted hybrid of personal memoir, murder mystery and 20th-century time portal. This surreal and densely referential follow-up, drawn in Ferris’s signature cross-hatched style, continues to follow 10-year-old Karen Reyes in circa-1968 Chicago as she wrestles with loss, sexual identity and a […] More

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      Barbara Taylor Bradford, ‘A Woman of Substance’ Novelist, Dies at 91

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      Her own rags-to-riches story mirrored those of many of her heroines, and her dozens of books helped her amass a fortune of $300 million.Barbara Taylor Bradford, one of the world’s best-selling romance novelists, who captivated readers for decades with chronicles of buried secrets, raging ambitions and strong women of humble origins rising to wealth and power, died on Sunday. She was 91.She died after a short illness, her publisher, HarperCollins, said on Monday. No other details were provided.Beginning with the runaway success of her 1979 debut novel, “A Woman of Substance,” Ms. Bradford’s 40 works of fiction sold more than 90 million copies in 40 languages and were all best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, according to publishers’ reports.Ten of her books were adapted for television films and mini-series, and the author, a self-described workaholic whose life mirrored the rags-to-riches stories of many of her heroines, achieved global celebrity and amassed a $300 million fortune.She was born in England into a working-class family whose grit inspired some of her stories. Her father lost a leg in World War I, her mother was born out of wedlock, and her grandmother once labored in a workhouse for the poor. She quit school at 15, became a journalist, married an American film producer and lived for 60 years in New York. She was a self-taught novelist, publishing her first when she was 46.Exploiting exotic locales and an arsenal of steamy liaisons, mysterious deaths and feasts of betrayal and scandal, Ms. Bradford spun tales of love and revenge, infidelity and heartbreak that lofted resolute women into glittering lives with handsome men, mansions in London or Manhattan and the board rooms of global corporations. Empires were born in her pages, and sequels turned into dynasties.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Madeleine Riffaud, ‘the Girl Who Saved Paris,’ Dies at 100

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      Madeleine Riffaud, a swashbuckling French Resistance hero who survived three weeks of torture as a teenager and went on to celebrate her 20th birthday by helping to capture 80 Nazis on an armored supply train, and who later became a crusading anticolonial war correspondent, died on Nov. 6 at her home in Paris. She was 100.Her death was announced by her publisher, Dupuis.Ms. Riffaud was propelled into the anti-Nazi guerrilla underground in November 1940 by a literal kick in the backside from a German officer. He sent her packing after he saw Nazi soldiers taunting her at a railway station as she was accompanying her ailing grandfather to visit her father near Amiens, in northern France.“That moment,” she said in a 2006 interview with The Times of London, “decided my whole life.”“I landed on my face in the gutter,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I was humiliated. My fear turned into anger.”She decided then and there to join the French Resistance.“I remember saying to myself,” she said, “‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this, and I’ll join them.’ ”Madeleine with her father, Jean Émile Riffaud, in about 1925. Mr. Riffaud, who had been wounded in World War I, was a pacifist.Fonds Madeleine RiffaudShe connected with the Resistance in Grenoble, France, at a sanitarium where she was being treated for tuberculosis. She had contracted the disease while studying midwifery in Paris.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dorothy Allison, Author of ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ Dies at 75

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      She wrote lovingly and often hilariously about her harrowing childhood in a working-class Southern family, as well as about the violence and incest she suffered.Dorothy Allison, who wrote with lyrical, pungent wit about her working-class Southern upbringing — and about the incest and violence that shaped her — and whose acclaimed 1992 novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” based on her harrowing childhood, made her a literary star, died on Tuesday at her home in Guerneville, Calif., in Sonoma County. She was 75.Her death, from cancer, was announced by the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, her longtime representative.Ms. Allison was flat broke in 1989 when she decided to try to sell “Bastard Out of Carolina,” the novel she had been writing for nearly a decade, to a mainstream publisher. “Trash,” a critically praised collection of short stories, had already been published by Firebrand Books, a feminist publishing house; so had her collection of poetry, “The Women Who Hate Me,” which she first published herself as a chapbook in 1983. In both books, she tackled lust, the scrum of feminist politics and her chaotic, beloved family. Feminism had saved her life, she often said, and she was certain that because of her political convictions, the mainstream press would not welcome her.“Bastard Out of Carolina” was published in 1992 to almost unanimous acclaim and made numerous best-seller lists.No creditMs. Allison liked to describe herself, as she told The New York Times Magazine in 1995, as a “cross-eyed, working-class lesbian addicted to violence, language and hope.”But at the time, she and her partner, Alix Layman, a trombone player who had been kicked out of the Army for being gay, were living on grits. Ms. Allison, who was legally blind in one eye, had numerous other health concerns and medical debt, and she could no longer support her writing with part-time clerical jobs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Australian Ballet’s ‘Oscar,’ Ventures Into New Romantic Territory

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      The Australian Ballet’s premiere of “Oscar,” based on the life of Oscar Wilde, explores the love relationship between two men.Boy loves girl. Prince enchanted by princess. Or swan queen, sylph, fairy, doll, peasant girl or courtesan.The central narrative elements of the full-length story ballets familiar to audiences mostly share a single element: The central romantic relationship is between male and female characters. Since many of these ballets (“Giselle,” “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty”) date from the 19th century, that’s not surprising. But well into the 21st century, ballet — unlike opera, film or theater — has been slow to take up the challenges of telling other kinds of tales.That changed last month, with the Australian Ballet’s premiere of “Oscar,” about the life of Oscar Wilde. Choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon and set to a score by Joby Talbot, it is the first full-length narrative ballet that makes a gay hero and his love for another man its central subject.In a video call, Wheeldon pointed out that Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake — which featured an unhappy, repressed prince falling in love with a fiercely alluring male swan — was a groundbreaking forerunner, although not a classical ballet. But since then, he said, almost no narrative dance work has put a gay romance at its heart. David Bintley’s 1995 “Edward II” depicted something of the king’s relationship with Piers Gaveston, the Earl of Cornwall, but even the Yuri Possokhov-Kirill Serebrennikov “Nureyev” at the Bolshoi almost entirely skirted the issue of the dancer’s sexuality.It was time for something more. “I wanted us to be a company that tells stories that resonate, to be bold in our storytelling,” said David Hallberg, the artistic director of the Australian ballet. “Oscar Wilde wrote these beautiful tales, but was persecuted in a way that is still true for many people today.”Wheeldon, a major choreographer, clearly likes a narrative challenge. He has created the full-length “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Winter’s Tale” and “Like Water for Chocolate” for the Royal Ballet, and directed and choreographed (and won Tony Awards for) two Broadway shows, “An American in Paris” and “MJ: The Musical.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lore Segal, Mordant Memoirist of Émigré Life, Dies at 96

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      One of thousands of Jewish children transported to England at the dawn of World War II, she explored themes of displacement with penetrating wit in novel-memoirs like “Other People’s Houses.”Lore Segal, a virtuosic and witty author of autobiographical novels of her life as a young Jewish Viennese refugee in England and as an émigré in America, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.Her daughter Beatrice Segal announced her death.On Dec. 10, 1938, 500 Jewish children boarded a train in Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport, as it was known, that would deliver them from Nazi-occupied territory to foster families in England. Ms. Segal, age 10, was registered as No. 152, the pampered only child of comfortably middle-class parents.She would go on to live with four families in seven years, including a pair of pious, garden-and-house-proud sisters straight out of a Barbara Pym novel whose influence would make Ms. Segal, as she wrote later, a temporary snob and an Anglophile forever.The writer at age 11. A year earlier, she was one of 500 Jewish children sent to Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport.via Segal familyHer parents followed her there in 1939, entering the country on domestic servant visas, which was the only route available to them. Her mother, a skilled homemaker, would rise to accept that role. But it would break her father, a former accountant, who died after a series of strokes.Ms. Segal, with the adaptability and callousness of youth, along with her innate sense of the absurd and the detachment of a born writer, fared better. After settling in New York, she found her métier by telling tales of her exile.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92

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      Once called “probably the funniest and most malicious” of the postmodernists, his books reflected a career-long interest in reimagining folk stories, fairy tales and political myths.Robert Coover, who along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others occupied the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and who went on to a long and prolific career writing and teaching, died on Saturday in Warwick, England. He was 92.His death, in a care home, was confirmed on Sunday by his daughter Sara Caldwell to The Associated Press. Ms. Caldwell, an author and filmmaker, did not give a cause but said his health had been declining recently.Mr. Coover’s first novel, “The Origin of the Brunists,” published in 1966 and fairly traditional in its telling, was about a religious cult built around the lone survivor of a mining accident in the Midwest.In The New York Times Book Review, Webster Schott wrote of its author: “If he can somehow control his Hollywood giganticism and focus his vision of life, he may become heir to Dreiser or Lewis.”If it wasn’t obvious then that Mr. Coover had no interest in inheriting the kingdom of social realism from Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis, his 1969 story collection “Pricksongs and Descants” made it abundantly clear. Those stories firmly established his career-long interest in remixing fairy tales, exploding myths and placing only the most transparent window in front of fiction’s inner machinery.“The Babysitter,” a widely anthologized story from that collection, rifled through the many possible scenarios of one night after a young woman arrives at a house to take care of three children. The brief, fractured episodes range from the banal to the violent and the lascivious, including the fantasies of the babysitter’s boyfriend and of the children’s father. (More than 25 years later the story was, improbably, adapted into a movie with the same title starring Alicia Silverstone.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More