FAMOUS BANNED BOOKS
SCANDALOUS STORIES OF SEX AND CORRUPTION -
scandalous stories of sex or corruption - famous banned books
CONTROVERSIAL
EROTIC
Caused A Scandal When They Came Out
SEXUALLY DISTURBING
Controversial Erotic
A selection of provocative books that were considered obscene because of explicit and sexual content or accused of corruption. Some of these books were banned for years and lead to controversial lawsuits and now praised as classics.
The following are included in my personal collection
1) Tropic of Cancer ( 1934 ) Henry Miller
"And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately"
DESCRIPTION
Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, 'one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.
“There is an eager vitality and exuberance to the writing which is exhilarating; a rush of spirit into the world as though all the sparkling wines have been uncorked at once; we watchfully hear the language skip, whoop and wheel across Miller’s page.” —William H. Gass, The New York Times Book Review
FACTS
Published in France in 1934 but banned in the USA until 1961
“notorious for its candid sexuality”
Famous court ruling which changed censorship standards to allow freedom of speech for modern literature
Now considered an American classic
Part of a trilogy along with Black Spring (1936) & Tropic of Capricorn (1939)
2) Venus in Furs (1870) Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
"To suffer and endure cruel torture from then on seemed
to me exquisite delight, especially when it was inflicted
by a beautiful woman."
DESCRIPTION
Venus in Furs describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of one man’s struggle to enlighten and instruct himself and others in the realm of desire. Published in 1870, the novel gained notoriety and a degree of immortality for its author when the word “masochism”—derived from his name—entered the vocabulary of psychiatry. This remains a classic literary statement on sexual submission and control.
Sacher- Masoch was the poet of the anomaly now generally known as masochism. By this is meant the desire on the part of the individual affected of desiring himself completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex, and being treated by this person as by a master, to be humiliated, abused, and tormented, even to the verge of death. This motive is treated in all its innumerable variations. as creative artist Sacher-Masoch was, of course, on the quest for the absolute, and sometimes, when impulses in the human being assume an abnormal or exaggerated form, there is just for a moment a flash that gives a glimpse of the thing in itself.
FACTS
The title was inspired by the painting of Titian’s Venus With a Mirror ( image of book cover)
Part of series which was never completed, Legacy of Cain
Masochism is a term derived from the author's name
The Velvet Underground band released the song Venus in Furs in 1967
Several movies and theater adaptions of the novel over years, latest by Polanski
TRAILER FROM VENUS IN FUR MOVIE BY ROMAN POLANSKI
3) Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Oscar Wilde
"Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins – he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all."
DESCRIPTION
In this celebrated work, his only novel, Wilde forged a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late 19th century England. Combining elements of a Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction, the book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world.
"Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich." extract from Picture of Dorian Gray
An astounding novel of decadence, debauchery, and secrecy from one of Ireland''s greatest writers.
FACTS
Oscar Wilde is a prominent figure in the aesthetic movement, a late 19th-century artistic expression of "art for art's sake" emphasizing visual beauty over practical or moral considerations.
Reviews of the book attacked him for his corrupting influence and offending moral sensibilities and this book was used against him during his trials.
He faced trials for gross indecency in 1895, based on his homosexual liaisons with a British aristocrat, which he pleaded not guilty but resulted in his imprisonment of two years, the maximum sentence for the crime.
This was a notorious case since it was one of the first celebrity trials.
Film and theater adaptations, like the 70's movie The Secret of Dorian Gray
4) Delta Venus (1977)
Anais Nin
“Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”
DESCRIPTION
In Delta of Venus, Anais Nin pens a lush, magical world where the characters of her imagination possess the most universal of desires and exceptional of talents. Among these provocative stories, a Hungarian adventurer seduces wealthy women then vanishes with their money; a veiled woman selects strangers from a chic restaurant for private trysts; and a Parisian hatmaker named Mathilde leaves her husband for the opium dens of Peru.
'Anaïs Nin excites male readers and incites female readers ... and she comes against life with a vital artistry and boldness' - The New York Times Book Review
In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning.
FACTS
Anais Nin is hailed as the most prominent women writer of erotica
Her mission was to express " women's language, seeing sexual experience from a woman's point of view.
She began to write erotica for a private client in 1940 in Paris, from which is recounted in her book Delta Venus and Little Birds
She had an intimate relationship with Henry Miller which led to a love triangle with his wife, and the inspiration for her book Henry and June.
Letter correspondence between the controversial writers are collected in the book A Literate Passion Letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller
There is a 1995 film adaptation of the same title
5) American Psycho (1991) Bret Easton Ellis
DESCRIPTION
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and he works on Wall Street, he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to head-on collision with America's greatest dream—and its worst nightmare—American Psycho is bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront
FACT
- The original publishers Simon & schuster withdrew the book due to "aesthetic differences"
- Some countries imposed restrictions on the sales of the book, such as 18 and over or sold in shrink- wrapped in Germany and Australia.
- Feminist Gloria Steinem disapproved of the book's portrayal of violance towards women. Ironically, she is the stepmother of Christian Bale who played leading role in film adaptation.
- In 2000 the movie version was released, staring Christian Bales along side Chloe Sevigny, Reece Witherspoon and Jaret Leto
HATE REVIEW
the most loathsome offering of the season
----Roger Rosenblatt, New York Times
PRAISE
Serious, clever and shatteringly effective
---Sunday Times
For its savagely coherent picture of a society lethally addicted to blandness, it should be judged by the highest standards ---John Walsh, Sunday Times
The Demon (1976) Hubert Selby Jr.
QUOTE
DESCRIPTION
A womanizer’s struggle for self-control spirals into crime, madness, and murder. Harry White grew up in blue-collar Brooklyn, but the young man’s charm, smarts, and good looks have helped him earn a place as an uptown junior executive. White’s gifts have also made his love life easy, and he takes special pleasure in seducing married women. But when “Harry the Lover” is ready to grow up and leave his womanizing behind, White finds that suppressing his libido has dangerous consequences. His attempts at restraint awaken something sinister, causing White to seek excitement in a new form of violence and depravity. Shocking and enthralling, The Demon is an unflinching meditation on male vanity by one of the most acclaimed and original writers of the twentieth century. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Hubert Selby Jr. including rare photos from the author’s estate.
FACT - Hubert Selby Jr author or Last exit to Brooklyn and Requim for a Dream, both of which have been turned into films.
- He faced an obscenity trial for his book Last Exit to Brooklyn
PRAISE
Author of the controversial cult classic, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby began as a writer of short fiction. He plunges the reader head-first into the densely realized worlds of his protagonists, in which the details of daily life rub shoulders with obsession and madness. Although fundamentally concerned with morality, Selby's own sense of humility prevents him from preaching. He offers instead a passionate empathy with the ordinary dreams and aspirations of his characters, a brilliant ear for the urban vernacular and for the voices of conscience and self-deceit that torment his characters.
REVIEW
Flowers of Evil Baudelaire
WISH LIST BOOKS
The following are more controversial books I'm interested in reading and some will be included in my next book order.
The 120 Days of Sodom (1904)
Marquise de Sade
DESCRIPTION
The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade relates the story of four wealthy men who enslave 24 mostly teenaged victims and sexually torture them while listening to stories told by old prostitutes. The book was written while Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille and the manuscript was lost during the storming of the Bastille. Sade wrote that he "wept tears of blood" over the manuscript's loss. Many consider this to be Sade crowning achievement
FACT
Sadism, which refers to the enjoyment of inflicting pain, is derived from the name of Marquis de Sade
He was a French nobleman, philosopher, revolutionary politician, writer
This book and other of his works were secretly written while imprisoned in Bastille in 1785
He was arrested in 1777 for several accusations of sexual assault, rape, and sodomy and sentenced to prison till death.
His books often faced censorship and were banned in the UK till 1950s
Reviled as of the most sexually violent books ever written
Inspired Surrealist artists who agreed with his views of sexual freedom
Cinema interpretation, the disturbing Salò (1976) by Pier Paolo Pasolini
- He commissioned erotic illustration to accompany his books
PRAISE
He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law.
“Sade is surrealist in sadism.” —André Breton
“Marquis de Sade is the personified perversion.”Miki Bunge, founder of indie publisher Goliath Books
This distressing but hugely important text has influenced countless individuals throughout history: Flaubert and Baudelaire both read Sade; the surrealists were obsessed with him; film-makers like Pasolini saw parallels with twentieth-century history in his writings; and feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Angela Carter clashed over him. This new translation brings Sade's provocative novel into Penguin Classics for the first time, and will reignite the debate around this most controversial of writers
ARTICLES
‘The most impure tale ever written’: how The 120 Days of Sodom became a ‘classic’ The Guardian
Who Was the Marquis de Sade: Even in the age of Fifty Shades of Grey, the 18th-century libertine is as shocking as ever The Smithsonian Magazine
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1787)
Marquise de Sade
"Life is just an uninterrupted series of pains and pleasures"
DESCRIPTION
'I have become whore through goodwill and libertine through virtue.' Orphaned and penniless at the age of twelve, the beautiful and devout Justine embarks upon her remarkable odyssey. Her steadfast faith and naive trust in trust in everyone she meets destine her from the outset for sexual exploitation and martyrdom. The unending catalogue of disasters that befall her, during which she is subject to any number of perverse practices, illustrate Sade's belief in the primacy of Nature over civilization. Virtue is no match for vice, and as criminality and violence triumph, Justine is doomed to suffer. Sade's writings have become a byword for transgression and obscenity, and the logical amorality of his philosophy still has the power to shock. By overturning social, religious, and political norms he puts under scrutiny conventional ideas of justice, power, life, and death. Justine is a ferocious physical and intellectual assault on absolute notions of good and evil, and as such, one of the earliest literary manifestos for atheism.
FACTS
- Justine, a novella written in 1787 during a 2 weeks in Bastille jail
- Extended and more graphic version later released as Justine ou Les Malheurs de la vertu in 1791, first book published by Sade
- Various film versions such as Marquis de Sade: Justine (1969) and Marquis de Sade's Justined (1977) , Vice and Virtue,
Against Nature (1884) Joris - Karl Huysmans
“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”
DESCRIPTION
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans is a novel in which very little happens; its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. Against Nature containes many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of decadent literature. Jean Des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he absconds to a house in the countryside. He fills the house with his eclectic art collection and decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris.
FACT
- Ultimate example of Decadent literature & inspired Oscar Wilde
- This is the book that is mentioned which corrupts Dorian Gray
"One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book." Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
PRAISE
It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high taste, he offers Huysmans's readers a treasure trove of cultural delights which anticipates many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarme and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work.
Les Liaisons Dangereuse (1782)
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
“How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what happens to be out of reach.”
DESCRIPTION
The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game - a game which they must win. This new translation gives Laclos a modern voice, and readers will be able a judge whether the novel is as "diabolical" and "infamous" as its critics have claimed, or whether it has much to tell us about the kind of world we ourselves live in. David Coward's introduction explodes myths about Laclos's own life and puts the book in its literary and cultural context.
FACT
- movie Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959) with Jeanne Moreau
- movie Dangerous Liaisons (1988) with Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer and Uma Thurman
-movie Cruel Intentions (1999) story set in modern day NYC
Irene's Cunt (1928) Louis Aragon
“I have never sought out anything but scandal, and I cultivate it for its own sake.”
DESCRIPTION
First published anonymously in France in 1928, Le Con d'Irene, is the last 'lost' masterpiece of Surrealist erotica. Likes Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (published the same year), Irene's Cunt is an intensely poetic account, the story of a man's torment when he becomes fixated upon the genitalia of an imaginary woman and is reduced to voyeuristically scoping 'her' erotic encounters. In between describing various events in brothels and other sexual adventures, Louis Aragon charts an inner monologue which is often reminiscent, in its poetic/ surreal intensity, of the work of Lautreamont, and of Artaud in its evocation of physical disgust as the dark correlative to spiritual illumination.
drawings by Andre Masson drafted especially for the first edition of "Irene's Cunt'.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover D. H. Lawrence (1928)
“Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to the same thing.”
DESCRIPTION
The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper class husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has been paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, the novel's title character. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance's realization that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This realization stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind.
FACT
- Inspired from his personal experience of his wife's affair
- Famous 1959 obscenity trial that allowed US publication
PRAISE
Lady Chatterley's Lover is both one of the most beautiful and notorious love stories in modern fiction. The summation of D.H. Lawrence's artistic achievement, it sharply illustrates his belief that tenderness and passion were the only weapons that could save man from self-destruction.
Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence's last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century. Filled with scenes of intimate beauty, explores the emotions of a lonely woman trapped in a sterile marriage and her growing love for the robust gamekeeper of her husband's estate. The most controversial of Lawrence's books, Lady Chatterly's Lover joyously affirms the author's vision of individual regeneration through sexual love. The book's power, complexity, and psychological intricacy make this a completely original work—a triumph of passion, an erotic celebration of life.
-from publisher
Lolita (1955)
Vladimir Nabokov
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."
DESCRIPTION
Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Lolita Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.
FACT
- Film by Stanley Kubrick with Sue Lyon in 1962, another in 1997
- On many best book list
PRAISE
Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
Madame Bovary (1856)
“Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.”
DESCRIPTION Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and devastating consequences. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." One of the greatest novels of the 19th century,
FACT - Scandalized France when originally published.
PRAISE
In Madame Bovary, his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day.
Story of O (1954)
Pauline Reage
DESCRIPTION How far will a woman go to express her love? In this exquisite novel of passion and desire, the answer emerges through a daring exploration of the deepest bonds of sensual domination. “O” is a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, determined to understand and prove her consuming devotion to her lover, René, through complete submission to his every whim, his every desire.
It is a journey of forbidden, dangerous choices that sweeps her through the secret gardens of the sexual underground. From the inner sanctum of a private club where willing women are schooled in the art of subjugation to the excruciating embraces of René’s friend Sir Stephen, O tests the outermost limits of pleasure. For as O discovers, true freedom lies in her pure and complete willingness to do anything for love.
PRAISE
The Story of O relates the progressive willful debasement of a young and beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, who wants nothing more than to be a slave to her lover, René. The test is severe—sexual in method, psychological in substance… The artistic interest here has
precisely to do with the use not only of erotic materials but also erotic
methods, the deliberate stimulation of the reader as a part of and means to a total, authentic literary experience. -New York Times
Story of the Eye (1928)
George Bataille
"Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror"
DESCRIPTION
Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
PRAISE
Only Georges Bataille could write, of an eyeball removed from a corpse, that "the caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." Bataille has been called a "metaphysician of evil," specializing in blasphemy, profanation, and horror.
Story of the Eye, written in 1928, is his best-known work; it is unashamedly surrealistic, both disgusting and fascinating, and packed with seemingly endless violations. It's something of an underground classic, rediscovered by each new generation.
Warning: Story of the Eye is graphically sexual, and is only suited for adults who are not easily offended. "Simone is a character in Story Of The Eye by Georges Bataille. It’s basically a book that proves that you should do what you want, no matter what. " Bjork
FACT - Björk cites Story of the Eye as a major inspiration: she made a music video that alludes to Bataille's erotic uses of eggs
-Marilyn Manson referenced Story of the Eye in its 2012 music video for "Born Villain".
FANNY HILL
Fear Of Flying By Erica Jong
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