Banned and Burned
Nothing certifies a novel's power like a state trying to kill it. Six books that were prosecuted, smuggled, suppressed, or answered with a death sentence: read them in escalating order of official panic.
Madame BovaryGustave Flaubert · 1857
Lvl 5336ppProsecuted for offending public morals in 1857 and acquitted into immortality: the trial that put literary style itself in the dock.
Tropic of CancerHenry Miller · 1934
Lvl 7318ppBanned from the United States for twenty-seven years: Miller's Paris scandalized customs officers longer than almost any book in English.
LolitaVladimir Nabokov · 1955
Lvl 8336ppRejected by every American publisher, then banned in France and Britain: still the century's fiercest test of what style can defend.
Doctor ZhivagoBoris Pasternak · 1957
Lvl 6592ppSmuggled out of the USSR, printed with CIA help, awarded a Nobel its author was forced to refuse: the novel as Cold War contraband.
The Master and MargaritaMikhail Bulgakov · 1967
Lvl 6412ppWritten in secret for the drawer: 'manuscripts don't burn,' says Bulgakov's devil, and this one waited twenty-six years to prove it.
The Satanic VersesSalman Rushdie · 1988
Lvl 9561ppThe capstone: the novel answered with a fatwa, the price of fiction made lethally literal, and the case for it made permanent.