The freedom to read is under attack.

From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. 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 will always insist upon reading for themselves.

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

“In this impressive book, Ira Wells provides an insightful and engaging discussion of the renewed embrace of censorship by both progressives and traditionalists and what it can mean for the possibility of building a more socially just and democratic society today. On Book Banning is a gem that I cannot recommend highly enough.”

—James L. Turk, Director, Centre for Free Expression, Toronto Metropolitan University

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