That Book Is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing

An alarming expose of the new challenges to literary freedom in the age of social media when anyone with an identity and an internet connection can be a censor. In That Book Is Dangerous!, Adam Szetela investigates how well-intentioned and often successful efforts to diversify American literature have also produced serious problems for literary freedom.While progressives are correct to be focused on the Right s attempts at legislative censorship, what is happening on the Left should be equally, if not more, disturbing, given the Left s greater influence inside publishing itself. The author draws on interviews with presidents and vice presidents at the Big Five publishers, literary agents at the most prestigious agencies, award-winning authors, editors, marketers, sensitivity readers, and other industry professionals to examine the new publishing landscape. What he finds is unsettling: mandatory sensitivity reads, morality clauses in author contracts, even censorship of 'dangerous' book