Naked Lunch
1959 · 304 pages
Addiction as the model for every kind of control: Burroughs turns junk sickness into a shrieking comic nightmare of mad doctors, police, and addicts. Massachusetts put it on trial for obscenity and lost.
★ 6.6
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
History of Sexuality, Volume 1
1976 · 168 pages
Victorian society did not silence sex, Foucault argues. It talked endlessly, until sodomy stopped being an act and the homosexual became a species. Queer theory has worked inside that claim for fifty years.
★ 6.6
The Kreutzer Sonata
1889 · 95 pages
On a night train, a man tells strangers how he came to kill his wife, then turns the confession into an assault on marriage and desire itself. Russia's censors suppressed it.
★ 6.5
Lady Chatterley's Lover
1928 · 342 pages
Paralyzed in the war, Clifford Chatterley loses his wife to the gamekeeper. Lawrence insists tenderness is physical or nothing, and the 1960 jury that cleared the book remade what British publishers could print.
★ 6.5
The Wapshot Chronicle
1957 · 400 pages
Leander Wapshot pilots a decrepit ferry while his rich cousin dangles the family fortune at his sons, payable only if they father sons. Cheever sends the boys into an America that baffles them.
★ 6.5
Coming of Age in Samoa
1928 · 223 pages
Sixty-eight girls on the Samoan island of Ta'u convinced Mead that the turmoil of adolescence is made by culture, not biology. She turned anthropology into an argument ordinary Americans took sides in.
★ 6.4
Season of Migration to the North
1966 · 169 pages
Mustafa Sa'eed sailed north to London and left ruined Englishwomen behind him, an African answer to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Arab writers voted it the century's most important novel in Arabic.
★ 6.4
The Berlin Stories
1945 · 207 pages
Sally Bowles, the English cabaret singer who became the heart of Cabaret, sings badly in a Berlin nightclub while Isherwood's narrator calls himself a camera, shutter open, recording the city's slide into Nazism.
★ 6.2
Portnoy's Complaint
1969 · 289 pages
Alexander Portnoy lies on his analyst's couch and confesses everything: a Jewish son's rage at his mother and an appetite he cannot govern. Four hundred thousand copies sold in the first year.
★ 6.1
The Bloody Chamber
1979 · 176 pages
Carter opened the old fairy tales and took out what was always inside: appetite, blood, and women who want things. Her Bluebeard is a French Marquis, and her Beauty walks toward the tiger.
★ 5.8