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‘Left-wing authors are
cancelling their own books. It’s f---ing wild’
Adam Szetela is a
young author going to war on cancel culture as publishing faces new forms of
censorship
A few years
ago, deep into his graduate studies in literature at Cornell University, New
York, Adam Szetela noticed a slew of stories about books being attacked and
cancelled for their dangerous content. As a self-described political
progressive, Szetela was struck by how this new censoriousness was
coming from the Left.
“I’m 35, so I came
up in the post-9/11 era, when I associated censorship with the Right,” says
Szetela over Zoom. “Growing up, it was the religious Right who were the ones
trying to control what you listened to and read. But seeing these stories, it
became very apparent that certain sectors of the Left have a very similar
tendency.”
There was one
book scandal that made Szetela realise there was something unusual going on. “I
remember vividly this young adult novel called Blood
Heir. It was a fantasy novel set in a world where people don’t see
race but there’s still slavery. People went after the author [Amélie Wen Zhao]
and said it was anti-black to have slavery that wasn’t African-American
slavery, and it was erasing that. That’s a preposterous accusation, in my
opinion.
“And Penguin
cancelled the book, sent it to sensitivity readers and eventually reissued it.
All this s--- at the time was new to me. I was like, ‘What the f--- is a
sensitivity reader?’”
There was a twist.
One of the people who had initially criticised Blood Heir was Kosoko Jackson,
who was about to publish his own novel, A Place for Wolves. “Just a few months
later he cancelled his own book after it was accused of Islamophobia or some
s---. I was like, ‘This is f---ing wild’, especially because it’s all [about]
progressives going after other progressives.”
In his new book, That Book is Dangerous, Szetela calls this the “circular firing squad”.
What had started as some notes on his iPhone developed into a research project,
and the result is an exposé of publishing that demonstrates how efforts to
diversify the industry have resulted in new forms of
censorship.
Published by MIT University Press, the book is part sober
sociological study containing dozens of interviews with editors, agents, and
authors – almost all of whom speak anonymously – and part feisty polemic. It’s
Szetela’s enthusiasm for the latter that will doubtless attract controversy:
perhaps even the kind of online pile-on that he documents in his research.
“I’m like, ‘If
this is what I’m privy to in public, then certainly there is stuff going on
behind closed doors that I am not aware of’. At that point I started reaching
out to people in publishing to investigate what is going on behind closed
doors.”
What he found from
his interviewees was a pattern. An advance copy might be critiqued for the way
it represented identities, resulting in an online brawl – what Szetela terms
“rage spectacles” – with hundreds, even thousands posting negative reviews of a
book which they had not necessarily read. What was most troubling, in all this,
was the move from valid criticism to demands for books to be banned.
Many of Szetela’s
examples of books that have come under attack are from the world of YA (young
adult) fiction: Laurie Forest’s The
Black Witch was subject of a campaign of one-star reviewing on
Goodreads because it included prejudiced characters; Laura
Moriarty’s American Heart, was accused of Islamophobia, and Kirkus
retracted a starred review after a backlash; some readers burnt advance copies
of Keira Drake’s The
Continent because it featured a “white saviour” narrative; Dav Pilkey’s
The Adventures of Ook and Gluk was pulled by Scholastic because of its
representation of Asian characters.
“Once you
start saying a book needs to be pulled from Amazon like it’s a f---ing weapon
or something,” says Szetela, “that just seems insane to me. I hear people talk
about how, with YA novels especially, kids’ brains are not fully formed, but
it’s like, dude, these kids have iPhones,
they’re on PornHub and s---. And you’re worried about a f---ing
fantasy novel that, on page 86, has something come out of some fictional
character’s mouth that is mildly sexist?”
Szetela’s book
argues that this censoriousness is, curiously, the consequence of initially
good intentions. “This all starts with a good faith effort. Can we make publishing more
diverse? And can we make stories more diverse? If you’re a young
reader, it’s good to see positive representations of people who are like you,
right? So when those books can be hard to find, that’s a problem. And a related
problem is there’s a history over hundreds of years of publishing of white
authors representing black and gay people in really stereotypical, offensive
ways.”
Yet, Szetela
claims, what began as an effort to address these issues resulted in some
authors being pressured to write about their identity. “It has created ironic
consequences for people who maybe don’t want to write about racism even though
they’re a black person. I spoke to this gay author – and this is representative
of many conversations I’ve had – and he’s telling me he was working with this
editor who told him he needed to “gay up” his work. He’s like, ‘Dude, I just
want to write about f---ing zombies; I’m not trying to write about being gay.’”
Szetela, from the Boston area, is the first in his family to go
to college and is the product of a blue-collar upbringing. In the
acknowledgements to his book, he thanks “my dad, Adam, an immigrant who blew
out his back and knees on the job before he died, and my mom, Suzanne, who
washed dishes in an old folks’ home, as well as my brother, Travis, who gave me
my first bloody nose, for never permitting me to self-identify as a victim”.
He says that his
writing style has been influenced more by his passions than by any intellectual
forbears: “the Ultimate Fighting Championship, bodybuilding, skateboarding,
mosh pits, rap music, stand-up comedy”. With his mop of hair, he looks a young
35, and has recently finished his PhD at Cornell. Alongside his academic work
he has worked as a freelance journalist, writing for The Washington Post and
The Guardian, among others.
One
development Szetela writes about at length is the #OwnVoices movement, which he
believes has “permeated every corner of literary culture”. The idea behind
#OwnVoices is that the most “authentic” novels are written by people who share an identity with
their protagonist.
“Sensitivity
readers emerge from this. If I’m a white dude writing novels, I can’t have all
my characters be white, right? Because that’s gonna get accusations of racism.
So I need to have diverse characters in my book. But #OwnVoices says I’m not
gonna know how to write a black character or a gay character. So sensitivity
readers share a ‘marginalised’ identity with a fictional character and help
ensure they are ‘authentic’.
“It’s important to
note that you don’t go to school to become a sensitivity reader. I’ve talked to
people in publishing and when I ask, ‘Where did you get a sensitivity reader
from?’ They literally just go to X and type in ‘sensitivity reader’. It sounds
wild when I say it out loud.”
But while the
industry navigates some of these issues with cynicism, readers surely do crave
a sense of authenticity in what they read? The reaction to the Salt Path scandal is
evidence of that. “I’m not familiar with that [The Salt Path].” But, he says,
take James Frey, “the guy that wrote A
Million Little Pieces. It turns out that the three months he spent
in jail was, like, three hours for DUI, and anyone with a thinking brain should
be critical of that.
“But I think
there’s a huge difference between objective falsehoods and more esoteric
definitions of authenticity that get intertwined with weirdly creepy ideas
about race … There’s a big difference between [the Frey scandal] and a black
sensitivity reader who purports to understand what would be in an authentic or
inauthentic meal that a black person is eating. It’s that sort of race
reductionism that concerns me.”
Given what
Szetela writes about, does he not fear his own online backlash? “There are
people from the get-go who are gonna be like, ‘Who’s this white, cisgender guy
to be writing about race?’ Obviously, these people who engage in these cancel culture effigy
ceremonies are not going to like it.
“As for me,
personally, I decided very early on, if I want to be a writer, I’m gonna
f---ing write about whatever the f--- I want to write about. If I wanna keep my
mouth shut and kiss a--, there are other professions. And like, yeah, people
are gonna dislike it. And, you know, if I wanted to be a professor, I know for
a fact there’s certain departments that would never hire me.”
Does he not worry
that his appetite for the kind of polemic that punctuates his book might
distract from the research? For example, in one chapter he pointedly attacks Ibram X Kendi,
whose books have a huge readership and whose work has been feted with many
awards. Kendi’s work is premised on the idea that we need to be active in the
fight against racism or risk complicity in it. For this reason, he argues, you
cannot be “not racist”: you are either “anti-racist” or “racist”.
Szetela rejects this binary. “I think [Kendi] is absolutely
emblematic of the problems I look at, and he’s a great example of how you
profit from this moment. I stand by what I said in the book, which is, ‘George
Floyd’s death was the best thing to happen to Ibram Kendi’s career.’ I
understand how that could be screenshotted, and the same people who are like,
‘Who’s this white guy writing about this?’, could be upset about that. Frankly
those are probably people who aren’t going to be sympathetic to any of the arguments
in the book.”
Szetela’s book
comes out at a moment when the political pendulum has swung back hard to the
Right. The Trump administration
has banned more than 500 books from its military schools,
including To Kill a Mockingbird and The Handmaid’s Tale, while across the US,
schools are removing books, including novels by Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison,
Kurt Vonnegut and even the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. Szetela is alarmed by
this new round of censorship, but points out that it is still also coming from
the Left.
“A few months ago,
a romance book [Sparrow
and Vine by Sophie Lark] was cancelled pre-publication, accused
of racism. It was also accused of including a fictional character who is too
sympathetic to Elon Musk. So reading that, I’m like, if I was writing a preface
to my book right now, there’s a f---ing example.”
His next book? He
is writing about why young men have moved to the political Right in the United
States. At Cornell, Szetela taught a class on the culture wars – now he is
about to wade right into them.
That Book is Dangerous! (£27,
MIT) is out now
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/d8c167bb8795d2f3
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Monday, August 11, 2025
The Muslim Brotherhood has no place in British
society
In an effort to promote community
cohesion, we have handed influence to those who pose the greatest threat to it
There is a peculiar silence that descends whenever the conversation turns to
the Muslim Brotherhood. Not the thoughtful pause of academic
caution, but the smothering hush of political cowardice dressed as cultural
sensitivity. Britain, like much of the West, has become adept at not quite
saying what it knows to be true: that the Brotherhood does not speak for
British Muslims, but rather exploits their identity to advance a supremacist
agenda.
The
Muslim Brotherhood is not merely a theological school of thought, nor a minor
current within Islam’s vast tradition. It is a deliberate, well-structured
transnational political project, whose ultimate aim is the remaking of society
along Islamist lines. Its brilliance lies not in overt militancy, but in its
use of the democratic process to undermine democratic norms. It projects
moderation in public while preaching ideological rigidity behind closed doors.
Its agents are polished, fluent and adept at cloaking radicalism in the
language of human rights.
The Brotherhood does not win through force, but by stealth:
attending government roundtables, winning grants, dominating community
organisations and inserting itself into institutions as the presumed voice of
Muslim Britain. It does not shout about jihad in the streets; it whispers about
Islamophobia in council meetings while vilifying Muslims who
oppose its rule. It is a soft coup of identity, replacing pluralism with
obedience and religion with ideology.
The
British state, tragically, has often confused access with authenticity. In its
effort to promote “community
cohesion”, it has handed influence to those least representative of
the diversity within Muslim communities. Local authorities, government
departments and academic institutions regularly platform figures linked to
Brotherhood networks, mistaking their organisational presence for grassroots
legitimacy. The result is a disenfranchisement of moderate Muslim voices who
neither share the Brotherhood’s worldview nor possess the machinery to counter
it.
The consequences are serious. British Muslims today are
caught in a pincer movement: on one side, targeted by anti-Muslim bigotry; on
the other, suffocated by Islamist gatekeepers who label dissenters as traitors.
The Brotherhood has created a political ecosystem where Muslim identity is
defined not by faith, but by fealty to a cause. Its fiercest opponents are
often Muslims themselves, but their resistance is dismissed as inauthentic or
ignored altogether.
This
conflation of Islam with Islamism is not just inaccurate; it is dangerous. It
entrenches the myth that to be Muslim in Britain is to support reactionary
ideology, and it stokes division by pushing moderate Muslims to the margins. We
must stop treating ideological actors as cultural representatives. Real
inclusion means engaging with Muslims as citizens, not as clients of political
Islam.
The
2015 UK government review of the Muslim Brotherhood, commissioned by then-prime
minister David Cameron, concluded that the organisation is secretive and
operates with a dual discourse – moderate in public, radical in private. It
warned that the Brotherhood’s ideology and network pose a potential threat to
democratic values. Yet nearly a decade later, that report gathers dust while
the Brotherhood continues to embed
itself within civil society.
To
protect British Muslims, we must do more than condemn anti-Muslim hatred; we
must also confront the forces that seek to control Muslim life from within.
This is not repression. It is liberation: a refusal to allow theocratic
ideologues to masquerade as spokesmen for an entire faith.
Silence is not the price of tolerance. Moral
clarity is. The UK must reject the fiction that Islamist movements represent Muslim
identity. Only then can we ensure that British Muslims are no longer trapped
between the hammer of bigotry and the anvil of Islamist dominance.
David Martin Abrahams is former Vice
President of the Royal United Security Institute
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/c21c583b499c2f71