Archive for Persepolis

les mille et une vie de Marjane Satrapi [cover]

Posted in Books, pictures with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 22, 2026 by xi'an

mort d’une résistante [درگذشت مرجان ساتراپی، مبارز مقاومت]

Posted in Books, Kids, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2026 by xi'an

Today, the Iranian-French BD writer Marjane Satrapi (1969-2026) died. She is the author of the monumental Persépolis (originaly written in French) denouncing the Islamic Republic theocracy, seen through the eyes of a young girl. (A book eerily banned from some US school libraries as Islamic literature!) She also adapted the books into a film, winning Special Jury Prize in 2007 from the Cannes Film Festival. I also loved her Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plums), following a tar player dying from sadness when loosing his beloved instrument after an argument with his wife. (Tragic premonition: Satrapi’s family announced that she died of sadness from loosing her husband, Mattias Ripa…) More recently, she also coordinated the collective book Femme, Vie, Liberté (Woman, Life, Freedom) in support of the Iranian revolts following the killing of Mahsa Amini.

banned books week

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on September 28, 2020 by xi'an

challenged books

Posted in Books, Kids with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 9, 2017 by xi'an

After reading that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the most challenged books in the USA, where challenged means “documented requests to remove materials from school or libraries”, I went to check on the website of the American Library Association for other titles, and found that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nigh-time and the Bible made it to the top 10 in 2015, with Of Mice and Men, Harry Potter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Brave New World, Hunger Games, Slaughterhouse Five, Cal, several of Roald Dahl’s and of Toni Morrisson’s books, Persepolis, and Tintin in America [and numerous others] appearing in the list… (As read in several comments, it is quite a surprise Shakespeare is not part of it!)

What is most frightening about those challenges and calls for censorship is that a growing portion of the reasons given against the books is “diversity“, namely that they propose a different view point, were it religious (or atheist), gender-related, ethnic, political, or disability-related.