Last year saw more requests to ban books in public schools and libraries in the U.S. than any other year….Texas led the nation with 93 attempts to restrict access to 2,349 book titles…. The most challenged book in Texas last year was Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning novel “The Bluest Eye.” Texas Standard, “Texas had the most book challenges of any state last year, according to the American Library Association,” 9/8/2023
Dear librarians of Texas,
I need to warn you about two dangerous books that must be kept out of our public libraries. For the moment, our readers are safe: no library in the state carries either one. Whew! Let’s keep it that way! Just like Fentanyl, these books deliver an addictive, highly pleasurable substance (suspenseful, witty narrative fiction) with an affordable street price ($20.00 for the paperback, $9.99 for the Kindle edition). If these titles are allowed to hit the street, they could spread across the state like a painful heat rash!
The first book, The Priest’s Hat, was written by a foreigner, the Italian novelist Emilio De Marchi. He has absolutely no interest in upholding the traditional family values of today’s Texas, since he’s been dead for over a hundred years.
What makes this book so dangerous? Right there on page 31 of the paperback edition a guy gets killed! Dead! With a crowbar! For money! And the reader has to read all the way to the end of the book to see if the killer gets caught! Is that the kind of world you want your readers to imaginatively inhabit?
You want to know the sad part? This made-up literary menace would never have threatened decent American readers if the novel hadn’t been translated by me and my co-translator and published last month by Italica Press (Bristol and New York). But it was never supposed to harm the Texas reading public. It was only meant to be used for myself and my coven (or “book club”) for midnight readings and discussions of the verismo movement in Western literature.
The other book, my translation of Gaetano Savatteri’s fictionalized examination of a Mafia assassination in post-war Sicily, A Conspiracy of Talkers (Italica, 2021), is even worse. Someone gets killed in the very first sentence! And two people are described as having sex even though they are definitely not married (pp. 96-99. Or if you have the Kindle version, just search on “nipple.”)! The only American character in the novel is into Dante, and we know all about that guy. He wrote two whole books about hell!
I’m not saying you shouldn’t acquire these books. How is the public supposed to stay safe if they don’t know about the danger? Order your copies today (we suggest the handsome hardcover edition) and display them prominently (but behind the counter!) on your Dangerous Forbidden Literature shelf, so we know what not to order on Amazon. Along with, you know, Nobel-prize winning novels like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
The Garden of Eaton 