Curated playlist
Obscenity controversies in literature
- Ulysses (novel)The novel Ulysses follows one ordinary day in Dublin, the 16th of June 1904. Its hero is a Jewish advertising canvasser.
- Neil GaimanNeil Gaiman is the first author to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Newbery Medal for the same book.
- Carrie (novel)Stephen King threw his first Carrie pages in the trash, and his wife pulled them out.
- Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryDahl's early drafts of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had nine golden tickets, not five.
- Charles BaudelaireCharles Baudelaire never reached India, yet he told stories of riding elephants there.
- Hugh HefnerIn 1992, Hugh Hefner paid $75,000 for a burial crypt in Los Angeles, and the neighbor he wanted was Marilyn Monroe. He never met her. In 2009 he told the Los Angeles Times, "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is an opportunity too sweet to…
- Marquis de SadeOn the 2nd of July 1789, the Marquis de Sade stood at a window of the Bastille and shouted through a megaphone he had improvised himself. He told the people in the street below that the warders were murdering the prisoners. That evening he…
- Charlie HebdoCharlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly, normally printed about 60,000 copies. The issue that followed the attack on its Paris office was first planned at one million. Within days the figure rose to three million, and then to five…
- LolitaLolita is a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, and the girl at its centre is almost never allowed to answer to her own name. She is Dolores Haze, and she is 12 years old when the story begins. The narrator is a French literature professor who…
- Brave New WorldBrave New World is a dystopian novel by the English author Aldous Huxley, published in 1932. It is set in the year 2540. Its London has no mothers and no fathers. Citizens are produced in bottles, sorted into ranks before birth, and kept…