Read a Banned Book!

1) Rabbit, run

Author

Updike, John

Series

Rabbit Angstrom novels volume 1

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback

Description

Click to view

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his?or any other?generation. Its hero is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty?even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though...

2) An American tragedy

Author

Dreiser, Theodore

Series

Library of America volume 140

Formats:

Book, Book - Hardback, eBook

Description

Click to view

Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) is nothing less than what the title holds it to be; it is the story of a weak-willed young man who is both villain and victim (the victim of a valueless, materialistic society) and someone who ultimately destroys himself. Dreiser modeled the story of Clyde Griffiths on a real-life murder that took place in 1906; a young social climber of considerable charm murdered his pregnant girlfriend to get her out...

Author

Formats:

Description

Henry Miller’s famously banned book is “a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one’s dreary life and following your heart to Paris” (Richard Price).

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...

4) The naked and the dead

Author

Mailer, Norman

Series

Library of America

Description

Click to view

Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei.

5) Women in love

Author

Lawrence, D. H

Series

Everyman's library volume 77

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

Click to view

Dark, but filled with bright genius, Women in Love is a prophetic masterpiece steeped in eroticism, filled with perceptions about sexual power and obsession that have proven to be timeless and true.

6) Brideshead revisited: the sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder, a novel

Author

Waugh, Evelyn

7) Naked lunch: the restored text

Author

Burroughs, William S

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

Click to view

Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship between art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media generally, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture.

Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of Bill Lee, addicted to hustlers and narcotics, and his monumental

...

8) A separate peace

Author

Knowles, John

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook

Description

Click to view

Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world. A bestseller for more than thirty years, A Separate Peace is...

9) Cat's cradle

Author

Vonnegut, Kurt

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

Click to view

“A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—The New York Times

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic...

10) Sons and lovers

Author

Lawrence, D. H

Series

The Penguin English Library

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Click to view

Penguin Classics presents D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by Paul Copley.
'"She was a brazen hussy."
"She wasn't. - And she was pretty, wasn't she?"
"I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and ask your mother for you - tell them that - brazen baggages

...

11) Sophie's choice

Author

Styron, William

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

Click to view

This award-winning novel of love, survival, and agonizing regret in post–WWII Brooklyn “belongs on that small shelf reserved for American masterpieces” (The Washington Post Book World).
Winner of the National Book Award and a modern classic, Sophie’s Choice centers on three characters: Stingo, a sexually frustrated aspiring novelist; Nathan, his charismatic but violent Jewish neighbor;...

12) The satanic verses

Author

Rushdie, Salman

Formats:

Book - Hardback, Book - Paperback, eBook, Kindle

Description

Click to view

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[A] torrent of endlessly inventive prose, by turns comic and enraged, embracing life in all its contradictions. In this spectacular novel, verbal pyrotechnics barely outshine its psychological truths.”—Newsday
Winner of the Whitbread Prize
One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s...

13) In cold blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences

Author

Capote, Truman

14) A clockwork orange

Author

Burgess, Anthony

Formats:

Audiobook CD, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

Click to view

One of Esquire's 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
"A brilliant novel.... [A] savage satire on the distortions of the single and collective minds."—New York Times

In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends'

...

15) Lady Chatterley's lover

Author

Lawrence, D. H

Formats:

Book, Book - Hardback

Description

Click to view

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...

16) The jungle

Author

Sinclair, Upton

Series

Classics illustrated graphic novels (Papercutz) volume 9

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Click to view

A documentary novel portraying industry's conditions at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Sinclair's novel prompted public outrage which led President Theodore Roosevelt to demand an official investigation. This eventually led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug laws.

17) The fellowship of the ring: being the first part of The lord of the rings

Author

Tolkien, J. R. R

Series

Lord of the rings volume 1

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback, eBook

Description

Click to view

"In a quiet village in the Shire, young Frodo is about to receive a gift that will change his life forever. Thought lost centuries ago, it is the One RIng, an object of terrifying power once used by the Dark Lord to enslave Middle-earth. Now darkness is rising, and Frodo must travel deep into the Dark Lord's realm, to the one place the Ring can be destroyed: Mount Doom. The journey will test Frodo's courage, his friendships, and his heart. Because...

18) All the king's men

Author

Warren, Robert Penn

Series

A Harvest book

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback, eBook

Description

Click to view

A dynamic backwoods lawyer batters his way into the governor's mansion, where he uses his unprincipled charm to become a brutal dictator.

19) Go tell it on the mountain

Author

Baldwin, James

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook

Description

Click to view

"A hardcover edition of James Baldwin's classic coming-of-age novel set in Harlem in the 1930s, with a new introduction by Edwidge Danticat"-- "The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision,...

20) The call of the wild

Author

London, Jack

Series

Tor Classics

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Large Print - Hardback

Description

Click to view

The adventures of an unusual dog, part St. Bernard, part Scotch shepherd, that is forcibly taken to the Klondike gold fields where he eventually becomes the leader of a wolf pack.