Banned Books Week 2026
Banned Books Week is October 4–10, 2026. This week and beyond, we honor the stories that spark conversation, shine a light on injustice, and refuse to be silenced.
We’re highlighting 5 books that have been challenged or banned from schools and libraries across the US. Discover these important stories and why they still matter.
The freedom to read starts here.
Ijeoma Oluo offers a revelatory examination of race in America in this #1 New York Times bestseller.
“Simply put: Ijeoma Oluo is a necessary voice and intellectual for these times, and any time, truth be told.” -Phoebe Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of You Can’t Touch My Hair
Protests against racial injustice and white supremacy have galvanized millions around the world. The stakes for transformative conversations about race could not be higher. Still, the task ahead seems daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. How do you tell your boss her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law hang up on you when you had questions about police reform? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?
In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from police brutality and cultural appropriation to the model minority myth in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race, and about how racism infects every aspect of American life.
The groundbreaking guide to trans history in America, revised and updated for a new political era.
Transgender History is the modern classic on transgender life in America since the nineteenth century, encompassing the major movements, writings, and events that shape today’s gender revolution.
Susan Stryker’s sweeping, intersectional account charts more than a century of history, showing how rising acceptance in the 1960s and 2010s was met with waves of bigotry and intolerance that began in the ’70s and continue today.
Through her explanation of central concepts and terms, informative sidebars, and brief biographies of trans pioneers, Stryker reminds readers of one crucial truth: Transgender people have always been here. In good times and bad, they’ve built supportive and expansive communities, battled for freedom, and transformed American culture and society in the process.
Now completely revised and updated, including a longer, global history and a timely chronicle of the latest wave of anti-trans backlash, Transgender History remains both a vital resource and a powerful testament to the enduring legacy of trans lives.
A National Book Award winner
The New York Times bestselling history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.
“An engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.” –Washington Post
Some Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America—it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched racist policies and the nation’s racial inequities.
In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking and, in the process, gives us reason to hope.
The New York Times bestselling account of one of history’s most brutal—and forgotten—massacres, when the Japanese army destroyed China’s capital city on the eve of World War II.
“A powerful, landmark book, riveting in its horror.” —Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb
In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered—a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Historian Iris Chang tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone that saved almost 300,000 Chinese.
More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, in The Rape of Nanking Chang analyzes the militaristic culture that fostered in the Japanese soldiers a total disregard for human life. It also tells of the concerted effort during the Cold War on the part of the West and even China to stifle open discussion of this atrocity.
Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors and documents brought to light for the first time, Iris Chang’s classic is the definitive history of this horrifying episode.
“[In The Poppy War] I also drew heavily from Iris Chang’s work… [The Rape of Nanking] touches on many themes—outrage, intergenerational memory and trauma, nationalism and erasure—that are defining features of the study of the Rape of Nanjing today.” —R.F. Kuang, BookPage
