For a few weeks this spring, you couldn’t swing a thyrsus in New York without hitting a play about Antigone. Perhaps it started with Robert Icke’s Oedipus, the Broadway production from February, which featured a modern-day Antigone as a sulky teen who little suspects that her father is also her brother. Soon after, four different theaters across the five boroughs staged their own renditions of Sophocles’s famous play, reimagining his two-thousand-and-five-hundred-year-old mythic figure as, variously, a pregnant teenager, an analysis patient, an incestuous home renovator, and a freedom fighter in a fascist regime in the future. The latter, in a bid to underscore the theme of rebellion across the ages, went so far as to include audio from the ICE raids in Minneapolis. 

It’s not hard to hazard the reasons for the renewed popularity of the Theban protestor who challenges the authoritarian rule of her uncle, King Creon, and is subsequently put to death. (One production titled its director’s note “Caution to the Resistance …”) But it is curious that, among the many iterations of Antigone now at hand, each has striven so forcefully to recast and reimagine her for the modern era. Virginia Woolf once wrote that Electra, another famous Sophocles ingenue, perpetually “stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can only move an inch this way, an inch that.” And yet contemporary theater seems to see Antigone as a character who can be moved quite freely—in the case of the Flea’s recently closed production, doubly so. The director, Alex Pepperman, based his adaptation not on the original text but on a script by Jean Anouilh, first staged in Nazi-occupied France in 1942. Where Anouilh’s Creon subtly echoed the spineless authority of the Vichy regime (so subtly that the play eluded the Nazi censors), Pepperman’s updated references are somewhat less oblique. “The time is 2030, and the neo-fascist Regime 47 has entered its Third Term in The United States,” his director’s note reads. “The 47th President continues to rule over all, now hailed as Supreme Leader.”

The other modern Antigones have perambulated nearly as far from their Greek eponym. The Public Theater’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) makes an unmistakable bid for contemporary relevance with its subtitle. The “I” of the parenthetical is not Antigone but the Chorus, voiced by a diffident cardigan-wearing woman (Celia Keenan-Bolger) who stands in, at once, for the classical Greek chorus; Creon’s wife, Eurydice; and, implicitly, the playwright. In an early scene, the Chorus confesses that when she first read the play in the titular English class, she had been put off by Antigone, recalling a girl who spoke too freely, too absolutely. (“I wasn’t feeling it,” she tells the audience, “I mean, here was this girl who says whatever she wants, whenever she wants, even on pain of death.”) And yet she was prompted to revisit the story after seeing it in the hands of a twitchy teenager on a plane, who didn’t “seem to like it very much.” The teen confirms: “Is it even about her? It seems like it’s all about her brother’s body. A man’s body.”  

From a touching sci-fi blockbuster to a wilfully provocative comedy-drama

In mid-March, Dial Books, a long-time imprint at Penguin Random House, shut down unexpectedly. No one knew it was happening, including the authors or the editors, many of whom lost their jobs. News about the closure offered no answers as to why this happened and why it happened so swiftly and unexpectedly.

Industry chatter suggested that one of the key reasons for this decision was a “softening” of the school and library market. That’s the kind phrasing for libraries and schools are no longer buying books the way they once did. This theory is not only likely, but it points to where and how people who haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing attacks on books and libraries the same way that advocates and those within these institutions have. While books have been banned nationwide in unbelievable numbers since 2021, that’s not been the only thing happening.

Numerous schools and libraries nationwide have been told they cannot purchase new materials, while others have been told that in order to acquire new materials, they need to jump through several hoops before they can hit “purchase.” And that’s if the budgets for these institutions haven’t been slashed before, during, or after the process.

Unfortunately, the pervasive idea that book bans affect thee and not me has led to overlooking what book censorship looks like right now, where it is, and how it will continue to impact the entire literary ecosystem. Whether or not you live in a state with protections for libraries and their collections, the reality is you face the consequences, too–including a shrinking selection of books that showcase the whole diverse and inclusive nature of the world in which we live. For those in states where partisan interests dictate your rights to you, the landscape gets grimmer and grimmer. Books and literature will never completely go away. What has been disappearing, and what will continue to disappear, are choices, voices, and perspectives that do not align with the regime at hand and white supremacy.

Texas has enacted some of the worst legislation to censor books in school libraries. The state would top the list were its legislative sessions annual, rather than biannual. Texas’s place as the second-most populous state means that what happens in public schools there has a tremendous ripple effect nationwide. Thanks to Senate Bill 12 and Senate Bill 13, Texas schools have been put under strict scrutiny that applies not only to books already on shelves, but also to those that may be added. School board approval or approval by parent-led School Library Advisory Councils is required for books to be considered for purchase. In a story from the Dallas Observer in November 2025, two Dallas-area county schools were waiting for approval for over 23,000 new books. If the average earning from each of those books was $5 for the publisher (a rough estimate, given that libraries get institutional discounts from book jobbers and different book formats cost different amounts), that’s $115,000 in lost sales.

Writing a book is hard. That goes for any kind of book: children’s or adult, graphic or prose, fiction or nonfiction. But that doesn’t mean they’re hard in the same ways. I talked to Sophia Glock, creator of the graphic memoir Passport and the graphic novel Before We Wake, about the unique challenges she faced when working on each of these books.

Before We Wake is the story of a young teen, Alicia, who is struggling to cope with her father’s death and her best friend’s drifting away into other interests. While the story is fictional, there are superficial similarities to Glock’s own teen years: both she and Alicia grew up in the early 2000s, for instance.

“Much of [Before We Wake] was inspired by actual events, and dreams, in my life,” Glock told me via email. “It’s a different sort of truth telling.”

She was also able to use her own experiences to inform Alicia’s sense of loneliness:

“When I reflect on my work, I realize I usually am almost always talking about isolation and connection. It may be because of how I grew up, moving from place to place, but I have always felt like an outsider, someone who exists between clearly defined groups and worlds. I also think that struggle, between connection and isolation, is quintessentially adolescent, which is a liminal, in-between state.”

Glock explored parts of her own life story in the nonfictional Passport, about how she grew up moving around Central America because, as she eventually discovered, her parents were CIA agents. This book presented much different — and, for Glock, much more difficult — challenges than Before We Wake did.

There’s one new title in the top five this week: The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez. Jimenez is best known for Just for the Summer, and her newest book is the current most-read romance on Goodreads. It takes that throne from In Her Own League by Liz Tomforde, which has slipped to the #7 spot.

Two New Books Out This Week You Should Know About

Unfortunately, the most read books on Goodreads tend not to be diverse by any definition of the word. So, here are a couple of new books out this week that deserve wider readership.

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

#5:

Picture it: a patron comes to the desk looking for a copy of the latest bestseller and is disappointed to learn that while yes, the library has ordered 10 copies of said bestseller, all of the copies are checked out and there’s a waiting list to boot. But wait! Before the patron walks away empty handed, you say, “But can I interest you in this similar book while you wait?”

As a librarian, I love pulling out a good readalike for a patron. It feels like a secret customer service weapon, and it introduces the reader to an author they may not have heard about otherwise. To that end, I’ve pulled together a list of three new books that are probably checked out at your libraries right now, as well as alternate suggestions to give to patrons while they wait.

If your patron is looking for…

You can suggest…

2026 has been a great year for horror so far, but this fall is going to be unmatched. Why? We’re getting new books from three authors who have written some of our favorite horror novels of the past few years. Before their new books come out this fall, make sure you read these authors’ highly rated recent horror releases. Then you’ll be just as excited about these books as we are!

Here’s what you’ll want on your TBR right now.

March 8 – April 11, 2026

March 17 – April 16, 2026