St Kilda booksellers share their favourite banned books
In celebration of Banned Books Week, our St Kilda booksellers have shared some of their own favourite banned or challenged books.
Amy Vuleta on Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence:
My mother tells a story about my grandparents and their friends passing a contraband copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, smuggled in from Europe, around their social group in country Queensland in the early 1960s. I was quite scandalised by this fact when I read the novel myself in my early twenties.
Dave Little on Ulysses by James Joyce (which he has actually read!):
James Joyce’s modernist classic maps a single day in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as they roam around Dublin and contemplate their lives. Within this somewhat simple set up, Joyce managed to encapsulate the entire life of a city and in many respects of English literature itself. Joyce also managed to craft a wonderfully oblique masturbatory scene on a beach that saw the book banned in English for years, before it became a central text in a number of landmark censorship cases around the world.
Kate O’Mara on American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis:
American Psycho is so perfectly of its time and place that without the notoriety it may have been forgotten… That said, it’s a brilliant book: however it earned its longevity – it deserves it.
Alec Patric on Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert:
I’d like to share Julian Barnes’s words about this novel: “ Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel.”
Isobel Moore on Forever by Judy Blume:
Sex Ed For All!!!
