Turner Publishing celebrates Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to read and highlights the value of free and open access to information. "Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular." -bannedbooksweek.org/about/

In honor of this week, we created a list of books we've published that have been made possible by open access to controversial books throughout history. These are staff picks we think you'll love based on classic works, like 1984 and To Kill a Mockingbird. Celebrate Banned Books Week by picking up a banned book, and support the book community by supporting our online independent bookstore: turnerbookstore.com .

If you love Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird... pick up Rob Rufus' Paradise, WV. Rufus holds a compassionate magnifying glass to those surrounded by the opioid epidemic in West Virginia. This small town thriller even contains a spunky trio that pays homage to Scout, Jem, and Dill.

The controversial themes Harper Lee wrote about in her portrait of Southern life in the early 1900s are updated in Paradise, WV. Rob Rufus honors the progress we've made, but forbids us from stagnation. A nuanced indictment of how circumstances can influence one's choices, Rufus refuses to stop there. Instead, each character is granted compassion, dignity, and a chance to act in their best interest.

If you love George Orwell's 1984... preorder our new sci-fi novel Interface by Scott Britz-Cunningham!

1984 shocked readers with its polarizing political commentary and the idea that Big Brother could take over in only a few decades. Similarly, Interface deals with issues of government that are relevant to current day politics. Because of Britz-Cunningham's thorough explanations of the technology behind his concept, Interface feels eerily plausible in our not-too-distant future.

“An intriguing mix of a good mystery and a twenty-first-century view of an Orwellian future.?Interface?is an entertaining, fast-paced detective story that provides a credible scientific and clinical version of what might be possible in the not-so-distant future.”? —John Donoghue, PhD, Wriston Professor of Neuroscience and Engineering at Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science.

If you love Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle... read The Hive by Melissa Scholes Young! The Glass Castle is a memoir of resilience and redemption. It examines a family at "once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant." Similarly, The Hive burrows into the lives of the Fehler family, and the five Fehler women who must reconcile their inner selves with their family's reality when the patriarch dies suddenly.

Facing an economic recession amidst the backdrop of growing Midwestern fear and resentment, the Fehler sisters unite in their struggle to save the company’s finances and the family’s future. To survive, they must overcome a political chasm that threatens a new civil war as the values that once united them now divide the very foundation they’ve built. Through alternating point-of-views, grief and regret gracefully give way to the enduring strength of the hive.