J. K. Rowling Doubles Down On Transphobia (2019)

Content warning: This paragraph includes quotations of anti-trans statements.

It all started in 2018, when J. K. Rowling liked an anti-trans tweet and then said it was a mistake: a “middle-aged moment.” Then, in 2019, she tweeted in support of Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who claimed she was not offered a job contract because of her anti-trans statements. 

From there, she started to complain about anyone using trans-inclusive language (like “people who menstruate”), then began misgendering trans women like journalist India Willoughby. In 2024, she said, “There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body’. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.”

2024 is also when Rowling donated £70,000 (~$89,000) to the anti-trans organization For Women Scotland, which lobbied to have the Scottish government change its definition of “women” to exclude trans women. When the ruling passed, Rowling tweeted, “I love it when a plan comes together.” with a photo of herself smoking a cigar on a yacht. In the same year, Rowling also misgendered and harassed two women athletes because she thought they were trans (they were not).

Harry Potter is one of the biggest franchises of all time: it’s incredible to see an author so completely poison her legacy by committing to bigotry.

Staff Commentary

I’m not a person who gets into conspiracy theories, but I won’t lie: the conspiracy theory that Rowling’s walls are covered in black mold is one that I really do want to believe in. That’s not because I want to vindicate Rowling–mold or not, she’s a bigot–but because what the hell was going on on those walls? There’s a whole horror novel to be told about the famous fantasy author who became a transphobe and then who was slowly taken down by the walls in her own house – KJ 

It’s hard to overstate how big a Harry Potter fan I used to be—not just as a child, but into my twenties. I went to conventions, spent my first paycheck on wizarding robes, and ran a fan Tumblr blog. Part of what I loved about it was how queer and inclusive the fandom was. But with Rowling devoting her life to bigotry, I no longer have any interest in Harry Potter—and hot take, I judge you if you still do. Even if you’re not directly giving Rowling money (which she passes along to anti-trans organizations), keeping the Harry Potter brand alive gives her a bigger platform. Do better. And for all that is good in the world, don’t watch or boost the HBO adaptation. (I will be holding a grudge, John Lithgow.) —DE

Rowling’s anti-trans stance broke my heart. Today, the only emotion I can spare for her is disgust. Because the Harry Potter franchise continues to grow despite the author’s hate-speech and bigotry, I know I’ll have to explain why we don’t support Harry Potter to my kids when they’re older, and I hope they’ll be proud to boycott all things Rowling. – SZW

American f#$^ing Dirt (2020)

In January 2020, a book with cover art reminiscent of Talavera tiles in Mexican design was making the rounds on the bookish internet. The art was evocative of borders and the migrant experience with its barbed wire grid lines, fitting for the tale of a Mexican woman forced to flee her home when a cartel murders most of her family. It was the “it” book of the season, getting the Oprah treatment and big-name praise by everyone from Salma Hayek to Sandra Cisneros, who called it “the great novel of Las Américas.” 

That book was American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, whose manuscript went for a whopping seven figures at auction after a nine-way bidding war. Cummins is not Mexican and has repeatedly described herself as white; though she does have a Puerto Rican grandmother, she does not appear to have identified as Latine until this book’s publication cycle. And in this book about Mexican migrants, she described her subject as a “helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass.” This novel was so obviously written by someone outside the culture who then reduced a complex set of experiences into a trauma porn narrative; yet it was being positioned as an authentic Mexican migrant story.

When more people started reading the thing, the trainwreck ensued. Scathing reviews by Latine writers like David Bowles and Myriam Gurba called out the book’s reliance on stereotypes and clumsy Spanish (or as Gurba calls it, store-bought taco seasoning), as well as the hypocrisy of publishing. Celebrities and authors quietly rolled back their glowing reviews, with several admitting to not actually having read it at all. Oprah defended her choice to select it for her book club, crediting the novel with making her “see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way.” Mmm hmm. At Book Riot, we dedicated an episode of the Book Riot podcast to talking through the controversy and our own decision to reverse a marketing campaign previously secured by Macmillan, American Dirt’s publisher.

Bowles and Gurba, acting as leaders of the #DignidadLiteraria movement, did eventually succeed in getting Macmillan to commit to expanding Latine representation in both its staff and the list of books they publish and promote. Today, it’s hard to measure the extent to which that commitment has been honored; anecdotally, many Latine authors have expressed diminished interest in and support for their projects in the last several years, with an especially anemic showing in 2026. 

American Dirt, indeed. 

Staff Commentary

My ability and desire to sit with the nuance of the “who gets to tell which stories” conversation dives off a cliff when my community consistently gets told there is no budget and/or market for our stories, then a publisher cuts a fat check to an outsider to tell an inauthentic version of our stories poorly. —VD

And another thing! If I had an ounce of grace to give Jeanine Cummins, it evaporated the moment she celebrated the release of American Dirt with a barbed wire manicure and a dinner with barbed-wire centerpieces. I don’t care that it’s a callback to the cover art, miss ma’am. The fact that you did not grasp why that was a terrible, tone-deaf idea is precisely why this wasn’t your story to tell. —VD

Where the Crawdads Sing author ties to mysterious death (2021)

If you were paying any attention to books in 2018 and the following couple of years, you heard about Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens’ debut novel that sold more that 12 million copies and was adapted by Ms. Book Adaptation herself, Reese Witherspoon. What you may have missed was that she is currently (yes, as in still is) wanted for questioning in a 1995 murder case in Zambia.

This little tidbit came out (again) in 2022 with the release of the film adaptation. Apparently, it had already been brought to the open in 2010 by way of an article by then New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg. Essentially, Delia and her now ex-husband Mark were conservationists in Zambia in 1995 when a poacher was murdered, and they (and their son Chris) were suspected by local authorities of being involved. Goldberg actually found out while researching that Mark was in charge of a group of militarized game scouts who kind of just did what they wanted. They were trained in combat and carried out raids on poaching camps. Mark also paid them in “weapons, boots, and money.” He’d even bragged at one point that they were going to increase their efforts. This all (allegedly) culminated in a wounded man being executed. This was actually recorded, and the footage was broadcast in a 1996 ABC documentary titled Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story. After the broadcast, Delia and Mark high-tailed it out of Zambia, and the footage has since been lost, which brings us to today: the body was never found, the investigation is stalled, there’s no extradition treaty between the US and Zambia, and Delia is still wanted for questioning.

Staff Commentary

Did we ever get an answer on this? I don’t think we ever got an answer on this. -JO 

All 850 Books Texas Lawmaker Matt Krause Wants to Ban: An Analysis (2021)

In 2021, Texas Republican State Representative Matt Krause sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency asking if any of the schools in the state had the books listed on a 16-page spreadsheet, as well as how much in funds schools had spent on these books. This is just one of so many censorship and book ban stories we’ve covered in the past six years—led by Kelly Jensen’s weekly Literary Activism coverage. But it’s one that reveals a lot about the project of book banning.

I analyzed the list title-by-title to try to see why each of them was targeted. Unsurprisingly, the majority had LGBTQ content. But there are also so many strange inclusions and omissions on this list. Why ban, say, just book four in an adult adventure romance series? Is the implication that all other adult romance novels are okay to shelve in schools? 

The most ironic title on the list has to be The Year They Burned the Books by Nancy Garden. Originally published in 1999, it’s about a town’s controversy over the high school’s sex ed program, and a school board member tries to get all the sex ed material, including textbooks, removed from the school. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Staff Commentary

But a harbinger of the last five years of widespread, rampant book bans. Krause never backed down from his nonsense. Meanwhile, the current Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, has backtracked from his staged press conference pronouncement of the state’s 2,200 title list of books that need to be banned. He claims there never was a list he referred to, even though not only did he refer to a list, it was one put together by one of the state’s leading (unelected) conservative activists. When forced to answer questions about the list, Patrick failed again and again. I don’t believe we’re anywhere near the end of this rise in censorship but I do think our cast of characters is getting dumber and dumber – KJ 

While analyzing this was depressing, it also reveals how fundamentally flawed lists like this are: it’s impossible to list every book you don’t think is appropriate for a school library. There are millions of books in the world, and most of them don’t belong in your school library: that’s why librarians are trained to select books. Book bans like these do a lot of harm, and they’re also completely impractical. It’s like trying to make a meal plan based on all the foods in the world you don’t want to eat. —DE

Bigolas Dickolas made This Is How You Lose the Time War viral (2023) 

We spend a lot of time on Book Riot thinking about how best to recommend books. In 2023, a Twitter account named Bigolas Dickolas showed us all up by tweeting, alongside the cover of This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, 

This tweet about a backlist book went viral—at the time of writing, it has been viewed 21 million times. The replies were filled with other fans practically foaming at the mouth to share their love for the novella. It shot the book back onto the bestseller lists. The authors were flabbergasted. As Bigolas Dickolas put it, “THIS IS THE MOST SPECIFIC THING THATS EVER HAPPENED.”

Social media is often a cesspool, but this was a breath of fresh air, a demonstration of the weirdest and best things the internet is capable of.

Staff Commentary

More viral threads about good books on social media, please! Stories like these are a delight, and I hope that Bigolas Dickolas has found even more incredible books to read. – KJ 

This one tweet did more than I’ve seen any social media post by a publisher’s marketing department do. It’s a complete fluke, something that is impossible to replicate, but it gets to the heart of what is so great about bookish social media at its best: the unbridled (sometimes feral) enthusiasm. That’s what really convinces people to pick up a book. —DE

This is hitting a bullet with another bullet that all happens within a bottle that also has lightning. So many books that take off online do so because of a bunch of small moments, but with this one we have patient zero. Nothing like it. —JO

That Time Taylor Swift (Didn’t) Publish a Secret Book (2024)

Do you remember the movie Argylle from 2024? Probably not: despite starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Henry Cavill, Dua Lipa, and Samuel L. Jackson, it got a 32% Rotten Tomatoes rating. For a few very strange months, though, it sparked a literary conspiracy theory. 

The movie is based on book four of the Argylle series by Elly Conway, which had not been published by the time the movie went into production. Who was this author who snagged such a lucrative movie deal before the series had a chance to build an audience? I mean, it had to be Taylor Swift, right?

The evidence for this theory was that the movie trailer included a Scottish Fold cat in a backpack with a bubble window—the same breed of cat and kind of carrier Taylor Swift showed in her documentary, Miss Americana. After that, anything seemed to reinforce the theory, like the main character wearing a cardigan, which must be a reference to the song “Cardigan.” 

This isn’t the first time the fandom claimed she wrote a book: Argylle is at minimum the third book fans credited to her. Spoiler alert: there was never any grand reveal of a celebrity behind the pen name Elly Conway. But these kinds of wild speculations are what make the bookish internet so entertaining. 

Staff Commentary

I think we all learned our lesson here. And that lesson is that we just didn’t try hard enough. -JO

Side note: I didn’t think it was possible to make Henry Cavill look unattractive, but the Argylle people accepted that challenge and crushed it. —VD

Neil Gaiman sexual abuse allegations (broader context of #MeToo) (2025) 

The biggest #MeToo allegations in the world of books and reading didn’t come at the height of the movement in 2018-2019 but more than half a decade later, which is one of the reasons readers were shocked when, in July 2024, two women, who were 20 and 23 at the time of the alleged events, came forward with allegations that Neil Gaiman sexually assaulted them. After the story broke, two more women stepped out with stories about their own encounters with the writer. One of them had receipts in the form of a $275,000 settlement that was accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. 

In response, many of Gaiman’s collaborators paused or canceled projects, while fans who had believed the author to be a good literary citizen and advocate for women struggled to wrap their heads around the reality that Gaiman likely was not the person he presented himself to be.

The story went quiet for several months until January 2026, when New York’s Lila Shapiro published a deeply reported—and deeply disturbing—piece detailing the allegations, which were far darker and more gruesome than even the original reports, plenty upsetting on their own, implied.   

And so the dam broke, with major outlets like the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and NPR issuing coverage. Gaiman’s publishers scrambled to manage their connections to the author, but a large portion of book media was conspicuously silent on the matter. 

Though Gaiman has been all but erased from publishing and the broader media landscape, the victims are still awaiting their days in court. Many of the alleged events occurred in New Zealand, prompting US judges to dismiss lawsuits because of jurisdictional considerations.

Staff Commentary

It’s hard to overstate how beloved Neil Gaiman was in bookish spaces. And this is just one (particularly egregious) example of celebrity male authors leveraging their power to abuse women, which is a story that we’ve seen played out multiple times in the past 15 years. —DE

Awarded Indigenous Author Thomas King Found Not to Be Native at All (2025)

Thomas King was born in the US in California, but his work was more embraced by Canada, where he won award after award for his fiction and nonfiction. Though, maybe now his nonfiction might be considered fiction. Kind of. I say this because King often wrote about the history and experiences of Indigenous people in America, from the perspective of being Indigenous himself. His 2012 (2013 for the US) release The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, was widely seen as a masterfully subversive and darkly funny history of Native American and European relations. Then, in November 2025, King met with the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds—a US-based group that exposes people who falsely claim Indigenous American heritage. After a few DNA tests, it was revealed that the Cherokee blood he’d been told he’d inherited from his father was not Cherokee. He said he was “Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.” This news came after King was already in his 80s, had released his aforementioned award-winning books on Native life, and had been a Native and American Indian studies professor for years. 

But, as Tommy Orange explored, this is just part of a long history of people claiming Native Ancestry because of one thing or another. He goes on to say how it can really mess with the heads of Native people who are just happy to have some positive representation. It’s super messed up, but at least in the case of Thomas King, the falsehood was not intentional—though he might need to start shifting into “making things right” mode…

Staff Commentary

Thomas King was the best-known, most widely read Indigenous author in Canada: his books were often assigned in schools. I taught one of his essays in my brief time as a high school English teacher. While it may not have been intentional, he also spent his whole career writing about Indigenous issues without establishing a connection with the nations and communities he claimed to represent. He’s taken up so much space in a publishing landscape that’s already difficult for Indigenous authors to break into. What a mess. —DE 

Emily Wilson versus Christopher Nolan (The Odyssey) (2026)

2026 delivered on literary controversy when Christopher Nolan’s grand, big budget adaptation of The Odyssey came under fire by none other than the classicist and translator whose translation of Homer’s epic (the first published in English by a woman) helped inspire his vision. Emily Wilson’s critique of the film got so much attention right off the bat that the influx of site traffic momentarily crashed The London Review of Books where it was published.

In her opinion, titled “An Uncomplicated Man,” Wilson called the film “a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth,” and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The fatigue is visceral when she writes, “Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object.” Wilson’s takedown was powerful in its clarity and it had something to teach readers about The Odyssey and adaptations of the source material.

Other classicists shared critiques of Nolan’s adaptation, but even Wilson noticed how much more attention hers was receiving. The outcome of it all was that Wilson became a name well outside of literary and high-brow circles. Her translation shot to the upper reaches of the bestseller list and Homer’s classic received more attention than it has in my lifetime. “An Uncomplicated Man” belongs in the critique hall of fame. 

Staff Commentary

My eyes LIT UP when I saw the headline and I spent the next 30 minutes trying to get the site to load. God bless academics with no Fs to give. —JO

I’m not sure what did more for my faith in humanity: Emily Wilson’s translation briefly toppling Theo of Golden from the #1 spot on Amazon, or seeing so many people outside of bookish circles react to this review. —RJS

Is it weird to say I enjoy reading and re-reading Wilson’s takedown? It’s so beautifully written! —SZW

As a girlie who loves mythology, blockbuster films, and a well-crafted takedown, I was fed this summer. —VDiaz