‘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