© Getty Images / Vishal Bhatnagar/NurPhotoAmerican Author Elizabeth Gilbert speaks during Jaipur Literature Festival at Diggi Palace in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, Jan 25,2020
English publisher Arabella Pike has slammed the withdrawal from publication of a novel by American author Elizabeth Gilbert, which is set in 1930s Soviet Russia,
after it received a litany of online complaints from Ukrainian commenters.
Gilbert's novel 'The Snow Forest' is set in 20th-century Siberia and was due to be released in February 2024 by the publisher Penguin Random House. However, in an Instagram video last week, the author said that she has "received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers."
The backlash, she said, convinced her that "it is not the time for this book to be published" - and especially one "that is set in Russia."
However, writing in an op-ed in
The Sunday Times, English publisher Arabella Pike was highly critical of Gilbert's move to suspend publication in the face of public scrutiny, writing that
it amounts to little more than self-censorship.
"Gilbert's right to choose whether or when to publish her own work must be respected," Pike writes. "But her decision seems a drastic overreaction -
a confusion of sentimentality with a political stance." Pike adds that Gilbert's move sets a "worrying precedent" that could embolden opponents of free speech.
Comment: One might initially assume that these criminal kindergarten teachers were sedating the children to make their jobs easier; however, considering how a number of other doctors are now implicated in a seemingly separate set of incidents, that the drugs used on the children may have been difficult to obtain without a prescription, and with the seemingly shady behaviour by police investigators, could it be it that something more nefarious was going on? Are some of the cases connected?