Atlantic County Library System

Aaron Robertson’s grandparents had a farm in Promise Land, Tenn. In a new book, he explores the history and meaning of such utopian communities for African Americans.

“Comrade Papa” is told from the perspective of two European arrivals to the West African country, nearly a century apart.

Thousands of books have been publicly challenged and removed from libraries in the past couple of years. Elizabeth Harris, who covers books and the publishing industry for The New York Times, explains how books are being pulled from libraries in a quiet process called weeding. Weeding normally allows librarians to keep collections current, but some lawsuits argue that it has been used instead to remove books for content about racism, sexuality and gender.

Transported to safe haven in England as a Jewish child in 1938, she explored themes of displacement with penetrating wit in autobiographical fiction like “Other People’s Houses.”