Censoring ALL the books that are coming out?

[PaDUer]

New novel features characters discussing how to assassinate *...

The angry author, a literary storm and 'one dead armadillo'
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
30 June 2004

After the recent flurry of damning political memoirs, not to mention Michael Moore's box-office busting documentaryFahrenheit 9/11, the Bush administration might feel it has been dumped on quite enough for one election season.
-snip-

Mr Baker's new novel, Checkpoint, features two characters who spend much of its 115 pages discussing how to assassinate President George Bush. They don't actually do the deed, or even attempt it, but the book is - according to early snippets - replete with deep-seated anger and elegantly nasty epithets hurled at both the President and his cabinet.

Mr Baker's publisher, Alfred Knopf, plans to release the book on 24 August, on the eve of the Republican National Convention in New York. To call it a provocation would be an understatement. The author and publishers have no intention of giving anybody ideas - to do so would be a criminal offence - but they are certainly playing very close to the edge in a United States that, in the wake of the 11 September attacks, has shown no compunction about locking people up and asking questions later, free speech rights be damned.

There was no immediate official reaction yesterday after extracts from Checkpoint were published in The Washington Post. A spokesman for the Secret Service, the uniformed outfit charged with protecting the President and other officials, told the Post merely that "without seeing the work, a determination can't be made at this time".
-snip-

Entire story--
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=536594

[Cats Against Frist]

1. Knopf is a big publishing house

which doesn't mean they publish the BEST stuff, but it certainly seems that in this current climate, anything sensational that gets a lot of bad press goes straight to the top of the bestseller list.