Book bans and challenges: September 12, 2025

Here's the latest news on book bans, challenges, and other literary obstacles — and efforts to fight back against them.

• A court denied a stay in the Trump administration's appeal of a ruling that put its dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services on hold (Book Riot).

• Speaking of the IMLS, $14,000,000 of its funds have been donated to a mobile propaganda project called Freedom Trucks, which Kelly Jensen reports on in her introduction to the weekly roundup of book bans and challenges (Book Riot).

• Jensen also takes us back almost twenty years to the varying political decisions that have left an Oregon public library district dependent on donations and volunteers — and vulnerable to anti-library forces (Book Riot).

• Brittany Allen catches everyone up on the brouhaha over how Powell's Books used artificial intelligence to design some of its latest merchandise (Literary Hub).

• The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that the reading skills of American high school seniors are at a three-decade low, with about a third of 12th-graders who were tested lacking basic reading skills (The New York Times).