I think the recent House of Holes by Nicholson Baker might meet the OP’s criteria.
Not that anybody thinks explicit sex scenes are anything controversial anymore, but the single-minded porniness of Baker’s work has many people questioning whether this actually counts as literature or is meant to serve any artistic purpose. As the reviewer in the linked article remarks, “House of Holes doesn’t appear to have any literary ambitions at all.”
Granted that people can be very sensitive about having their beliefs challenged, but this comes pretty close to asserting that if the novel is truly controversial it won’t be published, and if it’s published, it’s not truly controversial. It’s a tautology, and I think it would only be accurate if “truly” were defined in a very narrow way.
No offense, but this is silly. Can you provide any examples of subjects that “make you think” that no publisher will touch? Even holocaust denial stuff can get published somewhere, and that in no way “makes you think.”
Besides, nowadays any nutjob with a keyboard can self-publish anything he or she wants.
Meh. It was gross, but no more so than your average Stephen King splatterbook.
I doubt it, since Card didn’t even come up with the scenario. Empire was a work-for-hire book that Card was contracted to do by Chair Entertainment, who wanted a tie-in novel to go with a video game they were developing. I haven’t played it, but I believe the game barely touches on the Civil War plot for something more generically spy-heavy. The game (Shadow Complex) was a huge hit though.
Empire was also the inspiration for a later season of that bastion of subversiveness, 24.
I’d put it in the category of “trash”, but The DaVinci Code was moderately controversial due to the negative portrayal of Catholics and using the idea that Jesus fathered children by Mary Magdalene as a major part of the plot.
I read a novel several years ago that made me rethink the incest taboo (for awhile anyway). The couple was a brother and sister (adults), both with damaged childhoods, and the author convinced me that the only way they were going to have any kind of life is if they could be together, in every sense of the word. But dammit, I can’t remember the author’s name (or the title, of course).
Shortly after that, I tried to read The Kiss, but it’s a lot harder to accept parent-child incest. Plus, that book wasn’t nearly as well-written as the other.
Sturgeon’s short story – “If All Men Were Your Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” – isn’t really an argument for incest but I suppose it could be viewed that way.
Yeah cause that’s not something you see in every single Hollywood movie EVER.
Baker’s Checkpoint also caused a bit of controversy, as did Human Smoke - not riots in the streets or boycotts or anything like that, but critics argued pretty heatedly over both.
Slight hijack, but there was a well-reviewed movie not too long ago that casually made pretty much the same point; it promptly grossed more than double its budget, and the writer promptly got an Academy Award nomination (and Golden Globe nomination, and Writers Guild nomination) for Best Screenplay.
Lone Star, where Chris Cooper and Elizabeth Peña grew up thinking their small-town Texas romance was forbidden because of the racial aspect; they reconnect years later during a murder investigation, eventually learn they were kept apart because they had the same father – and after mulling things over, decide, hey, it’s not like we were looking to have kids, so what’s the harm in staying together?
Not in the film adaptation of the Running Man, at any rate, not like in the book.
Apart from the book being really grim and the movie incredibly weird and flashy, it was the same message. Maybe not the same way of delivering it, but the same message.