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LITHUBThoreau Was Actually Funny as Hell
When I was 14 my mother, exasperated by the onset of my teenage angst, handed me a Penguin paperback of Thoreau’s Walden and said, “Read this. The guy who wrote it was a rebel like you.” For some reason, I did as she suggested, and in Walden’s transcendental rants I found all my angsty teenage convictions gloriously and authoritatively ratified.
LITHUBWhy Exactly is This Book Obscene?
Plenty of books have been banned or censored over the years—and even more attempts have been made to ban and censor them. But I’ve always wondered exactly what these books were brought to trial for. “Obscenity,” after all, is a pretty wide field. It’s obscene, the number of things I’ve called obscene. So what was it? A certain number of bad words? General sexiness? A queasy feeling in the gut by a well-connected reader? I tracked down a few answers for famous books deemed (by some) obscene. Mostly, it’s about bad words—but sometimes it’s also communism!
LithubThe Unlikely Pulp Fiction Illustrations of Edward Hopper
When the iconic painter drew cowboys for adventure magazine
lithubWhat Does Immersing Yourself in a Book Do To Your Brain?
On Neurochemistry, Lucia Berlin, and the Dangers of Empathy Loss
lithubLiterary Hoax is the Most Underappreciated Genre
From James Macpherson to Lee Israel to JT LeRoy, It's All Good
lithubColor or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange”
Yeah, But Can You Rhyme Something With It?
LITHUBThe New York Times: “Lolita is disgusting”
Today in 1953, Vladimir Nabokov finished Lolita. Upon its publication, the New York Times said, "there are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive."
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