The Most Challenged and Banned Books
Books have an inherent ability to expand a reader’s horizons, touch their hearts, and change their minds. Reading a wide range of perspectives not only makes us better, it helps us exercise empathy and see the world in new eyes. Books are powerful. But with the growing number of books being challenged and banned, it is up to all of us to make sure these stories continue to be read and shared. Learn more about the rapid rise of book challenges and bans through data and reports from the American Library Association. Find more resources for parents, educators, and more here.
This year, join us at the Banned Wagon – making stops in New York City, Detroit, and Chicago from October 4-10, 2026. The Banned Wagon will showcase more than 50 banned and challenged books for readers of all ages, from picture books to novels, and distribute free copies to attendees while supplies last.
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Add to BookshelfGender Queer
by Maia Kobabe
Read by Maia Kobabe, Trini Alvarado, Stephen Graybill, Phoebe Kobabe, Jeremy Carlisle Parker and Full Cast
The groundbreaking, bestselling graphic novel is now available on audio. In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Then e created Gender Queer. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity — what it means and how to think about it — for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove — and 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others — prays for her eyes to turn blue: So that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Revised Edition)
by Jesse Andrews
Read by Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Keith Szarabajka, Hillary Huber, Kirby Heyborne, Abigail Revasch and Adenrele Ojo
Up until senior year, Greg has maintained total social invisibility. He only has one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies. Greg would be the first one to tell you his movies are terrible, but he and Earl don’t make them for other people. Until Rachel. Rachel, who has leukemia, befriends Greg and Earl. When Rachel decides to stop treatment, Greg and Earl must abandon invisibility and make a stand. It’s a hilarious, outrageous, and truthful look at death and high school by a prodigiously talented debut author.
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nick Carraway is an aspiring writer; his cousin, Daisy, is married to the fabulously wealthy Tom Buchanan. Their neighbor, Jay Gatsby, throws extravagant and extraordinary parties in the exclusive and hallowed neighborhood of West Egg. The entanglements between these four characters form the backbone of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest work. The classic novel that continues to haunt our understanding of ambition, love, entitlement, and the American Dream.
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone). Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
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$20.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Breathless
by Jennifer Niven
Dive into an unforgettable novel about falling in love for the first time from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places. Compulsively readable and impossible to forget, Jennifer Niven’s luminous novel is a tender portrait of a young woman determined to write her own next chapter — love, heartbreak, mosquito bites, and all.
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$12.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The 1619 Project
created by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine
A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. This book speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction — and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.
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$25.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest.
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$21.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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When Stars Are Scattered
by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed
Omar and his younger brother, Hassan, have spent most of their lives in Dadaab, a refugee camp in Kenya. Life is hard there: Never enough food, achingly dull, and without access to medical care Omar knows his nonverbal brother needs. So when Omar has the opportunity to go to school, he knows it might be a chance to change their future … but it would also mean leaving his brother, the only family member he has left, every day. Heartbreak, hope, and gentle humor exist together in this graphic novel about a childhood spent waiting, and a young man who is able to create a sense of family and home in the most difficult of settings.
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$24.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood
In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. The Handmaid’s Tale is an instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (The New York Times).
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Forever . . .
by Judy Blume
Read by Caitlin Kinnunen and Judy Blume
Katherine and Michael are in love, and Katherine knows it’s forever — especially after she loses her virginity to him. But when they’re separated for the summer, she begins to have feelings for another boy. What does this say about her love for Michael? And what does “forever” mean, anyway? Is this the love of a lifetime, or the very beginning of a lifetime of love?
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century.
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: To be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life.
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$26.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Go Tell It on the Mountain (Deluxe Edition)
by James Baldwin
Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin’s first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a 14-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Complete Maus
by Art Spiegelman
A brutally moving work of art — widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written — Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.
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$40.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Bless Me, Ultima
by Rudolfo Anaya
Although only six years old, Antonio Marez is perceptive beyond his years. He was brought into the world with the help of Ultima, a curandera, or folk healer, in touch with nature and the spirit world. Revered by some as a wisewoman but rebuked by others as a witch, Ultima has now come back to stay with Tony’s family in New Mexico. As Tony seeks out his destiny — torn between his mother’s farming forebears and his father’s wandering vaquero roots, between Spanish Catholicism and the gods of his indigenous ancestors — Ultima’s loving tutelage will help him navigate questions of life and death, good and evil, and reveal to him the vastness of the heritage that shapes him, in this pioneering work of literature.
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$32.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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A Clash of Kings
by George R. R. Martin
A comet the color of blood and flame cuts across the sky. And from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns. Six factions struggle for control of a divided land and the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms, preparing to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war. Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, victory may go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel … and the coldest hearts. For when kings clash, the whole land trembles.
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$22.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Heather Has Two Mommies
by Lesléa Newman
Heather’s favorite number is two. She has two arms, two legs, two pets — and two mommies. When Heather goes to school for the first time, someone asks her about her daddy, but Heather doesn’t have a daddy. Then something interesting happens. When Heather and her classmates all draw pictures of their families, not one drawing is the same!
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$8.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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Last Night at the Telegraph Club
by Malinda Lo
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the feeling took root — that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible. But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love. Lily and Kath will need to risk everything to let their love see the light of day.
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$13.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
Told in a series of vignettes — sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous — Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. It makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you’re from.
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$30.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
One of the most moving and eloquent accounts of the Holocaust, The Diary of a Young Girl is the record of two years in the life of a remarkable Jewish girl whose triumphant humanity in the face of unfathomable deprivation and fear has made the book one of the most enduring documents of our time.
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$30.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Man o’ War
by Cory McCarthy
An achingly honest and frequently hilarious coming-of-age novel about an Arab American trans teen fighting to keep their head above water in a landlocked Midwestern town. What follows is a wrenching journey of self-discovery that spans years and winds through layers of coming out, transition, and top surgery, promising a free life for River with so much more than happiness: A life that’s full of trans joy and true love.
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$13.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl
by Tanya Lee Stone
Josie, Nicolette, and Aviva all get mixed up with a senior boy — a cool, slick, sexy boy who can talk them into doing almost anything he wants. In a blur of high school hormones and personal doubt, each girl struggles with how much to give up and what ultimately to keep for herself. How do girls handle themselves? How much can a boy get away with? And in the end, who comes out on top? A bad boy may always be a bad boy. But this bad boy is about to meet three girls who won’t back down.
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$13.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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1984
by George Orwell
Written 75 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever …
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy Box Set
by A. N. Roquelaure
In 1983, Anne Rice, writing as A. N. Roquelaure, began the first installment of the series that is now considered a forerunner of erotic literature. This boxed set, containing the New York Times bestseller The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, and Beauty’s Release is a testament to Rice’s irresistible talent, charged eroticism, and magical style.
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$54.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Chocolate War
by Robert Cormier
One of the most controversial YA novels of all time, The Chocolate War is a modern masterpiece that speaks to fans of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. This chilling portrait of an all-boys prep school casts an unflinching eye on the pitfalls of conformity and corruption in our most elite cultural institutions.
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$11.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (HBO Tie-In Edition)
by Philip Pullman
In this modern fantasy classic, Philip Pullman takes readers to a world where humans have animal familiars and where parallel universes are within reach.
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$12.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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What Girls Are Made Of
by Elana K. Arnold
Sixteen-year-old Nina isn’t made of sugar and spice and everything nice. She is flesh and blood and desire, but she longs to know real love. Unconditional love. The kind her mother told her doesn’t exist. Raw, emotional writing and a frank portrayal of the world teen girls live in set this award-winning book apart as a stunning chronicle of self-acceptance.
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$9.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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Skippyjon Jones
by Judy Schachner
Skippyjon Jones is no ordinary kitten. Oh, no … He’s actually El Skippito, a great sword-fighter ready to battle banditos the world over! With a little imagination and a whole lot of fun, this frisky cat dons a mask and cape and takes on a bad bumble-beeto to save the day. And along the way, he’ll be sure to steal young reader’s hearts, yes indeed-o!
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$8.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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Looking for Alaska
by John Green
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words — and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps. Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another.
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$12.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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Hair Love
by Matthew A. Cherry
It’s up to Daddy to give his daughter an extra-special hair style in this ode to self-confidence and the love between fathers and daughters, from Academy Award-winning director and former NFL wide receiver Matthew A. Cherry and New York Times bestselling illustrator Vashti Harrison.
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$18.99Buy from Other Retailers:
