On Censorship with Marc Levy

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Last year, according to PEN America, nearly 12,000 book bans took place in US public schools. Our guest this week is Marc Levy, who wrote *The Bookshop of Forbidden Books.* He is the author of twenty-seven other novels published in fifty languages. With more than fifty million copies sold, he is the most-read French author alive. A nationwide poll by Le Figaro ranked him alongside Victor Hugo as France’s favourite writer. He currently lives in New York. At eighteen years old he joined the Red Cross, where he worked for six years. He then founded a computer graphics company operating in France and the United States, and later started an architecture firm with two friends that became one of the leading firms in France. He wrote his first novel, *If Only It Were True*, when he was 37. Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks bought the film rights before the book was even published, and the film, *Just Like Heaven*, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, went to number one at the US box office in 2005. Several of his novels have been adapted for the screen, including *All Those Things We Never Said*, which Canal+ broadcast in 2022. His latest novel, *The Rebel Sisters*, comes out in France this autumn in two volumes. We talk about: - How a Florida law can pull thousands of books off library shelves in a day - Why authoritarians need citizens to be ignorant and scared - And why books are the antidote to both - Did the woke movement pave the way for censorship overreach? - Why 380 words have been struck from official US vocabulary - Tyrants don’t need monsters, they need a system - Why the dictionary is the most dangerous book Let’s begin! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet