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

English literature PhD Szetela’s cutting debut reveals how progressives’ moral panic has created a chilling effect throughout the publishing industry. Szetela shows how the past decade’s worth of well-intentioned efforts to diversify publishing have resulted, instead, in a “circular firing squad,” with social media crusades leading to canceled or heavily reedited novels, morality clauses incorporated into author contracts, and books’ “relevance reduced to the demographic characteristics of its author.” His litany of literary wokeism’s excesses range from laughable (sensitivity readers specializing in “furry fandom”) to disturbing (demands to remove Toni Morrison’s “triggering” The Bluest Eye from a college syllabus). While the author offers incisive analysis, such as pinpointing how there is an “inattention to class differences” inherent in these literary debates, the book’s most illuminating contribution is Szetela’s collation of dozens of anonymous interviews with publishing insiders. They include an agent of color who reports that authors now “feel forced against their will to identify a certain way” and a vice president at a Big Five who, in a damning indictment of the current state of affairs, “reconfirmed their name would not be attached to one word they said.” Still, Szetela’s frequent comparisons of the present situation to dystopian classics like Fahrenheit 451 come off as exaggerated. It’s a dire, if itself somewhat panicky, warning about the self-censorship pervading a morally panicked industry. (Aug.)