Any recommendations? Most lists out there are for books banned decades ago whose ideas are hardly provocative or mind blowing any more. Doesn’t have to be fiction, though that’s preferred.
Should be at least somewhat thought provoking - not just trashy for the sake of trashy or controversial only because the author is dressing up old bigotry in new clothes.
I guess there’s two main categories, though I welcome other ideas:
Hey that’s a new idea no one has really talked about before
In the area of novels, I’d say yes. I’ve tried to think of a novel I would consider controversial or subversive, but no dice. I’ve been checking this thread to see if someone else comes up with something, but also no dice. Last one I can think of was that Salman Rushdie novel, but the whole story there was how backward and ignorant the cleric who declared the fatwah was, not Rushdie’s novel.
Lol. I had considered using that as an example of what I don’t want. Looking for the actual content to be mind blowing rather than the authors own shenanigans.
I guess the book doesn’t have to be recent, as long as the modern reader would still be surprised by the content. Maybe that Sam Delaney book would still count.
Would it matter if I opened it up to film and other media?
Elfriede Jelinek is one good example, I’d say. She won the Nobel Prize, but it was an intensely controversial decision (I think a member of the Academy resigned in protest), and her novels are overall pretty raw and unpleasant. On a similar note, arguably, Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands.
Others: Thomas Bernhard (at least one of his novels caused a big stir in Austria, if I remember correctly) and Bret Easton Ellis with American Psycho (a bad novel, but it definitely raised a fuss).
Just finished Limitless (originally published in 2001 under the title The Dark Fields) by the Irish author Alan Glynn, which inspired the recent movie starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. The book is a great technothriller about a cutting-edge drug which unlocks the full potential of the human mind - it’s clever and engaging, but quite a bit darker and grimmer than the movie. Much as I enjoyed the book, I actually preferred the movie - one of the few times that’s been so. Both the book and the movie have an interesting dramatic tension between “Illegal drugs are bad” and “Wow, is the guy really going to be able to pull this off?”
I have and that review (like all of them relating to Haunted) is a load of hogwash. The “skewering of the modern celebrity” bit was taken from the book jacket, but it was clear the publishers had never read it either. There are a few lines about people believing that once they’re rescued from their self-imposed exile, they’ll become celebrities, but that’s all it is. It actually strains disbelief to hear their reasons why being pseudo-kidnapped will set them up for life. Andy Warhol’s famous quote is 35 years old for a reason.
Another recent book or movie did the same “After we’re rescued from our fake kidnapping we’ll be set for life!” think and I didn’t find it any better there either. But I can’t remember what it was.
I recently read it for the 2nd time after quite a few years, and was left with an unsettled, queasy feeling for a few days. I don’t think any other book has done that to me.
Jelinek and Roche are great examples. I’ll add Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (criticized for being Islamophobic and pro-sex tourism).
Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones won France’s most prestigious literary prize but was widely panned in America. Lots of holocaust stuff and incest, etc. I think Kakutani called it repellent.
“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” --Don Marquis
That’s probably the quotation I cite most often. Any truly controversial novel would probably be so hated that it would never get published, let alone distributed, sold, and read.