Good News/Bad News: Eric Selinger, Margo Hendricks, Book Bans

Eric Selinger has made most of his romance scholarship available for free online in pre-print form. That includes:

• Disaggregating attraction: asexuality and genre critique in Alex Beecroft's Blue Steel Chain
• The wild heart of the continent: love and place in the Silk Road novels of Sherry Thomas 
• Disenchantment and its discontents: “modern love” and irony in popular romance fiction 
• Romance and/as religion (co-authored with me)
  
•  When I Paint My Masterpiece: Bob Dylan, Ekphrasis, and the Art of Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Margo Hendricks'Race and Romance: Coloring the Past  has been published by Arizona State University Press and is available to read for free online.

As reported by Sarah MacLean, in Enid & Garfield County, Oklahoma the target of book-banning is getting wider:

[From the Facebook page of the Public Library of Enid & Garfield County: "In light of recent changes to program and display policies at the Public Library of Enid and Garfield County, 2 programs have been canceled for the month of April.
The Sexual Assault Awareness program/display and the Shameless Romance book club discussion have been canceled. Displays or programs that focus on sexual content are not allowed at the library. The library respects the authority of the library board to set library policies. Community members who would like to be heard on the subject of library board policies are encouraged to contact the library board, city council or the mayor."]

As Molly Keran commented:

Not sure who this is supposed to protect but it sure isn’t women, or children, or survivors. While the SA awareness stuff is obviously most terrible here, I do think these are two sides of a coin. Not only does literature & resources dealing with SA help people recognize abusive dynamics they may experience but literature that centers pleasure & consent can do the same. We need to be able to discuss a wide range of experiences and narratives of sex (good, bad, nonconsensual, consensual, straight, queer, fictional, nonfictional, etc etc) because ignorance, silence, and shame create the conditions for exploitation and abuse.