Banned Books

(HarperPerennial Modern Classics series). Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerfully evocative novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feeling of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America. It tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. This edition features the restored text established by The Library of America. Chronology, Note on the Texts, Notes. 504p. Kindle Price: $6.64

Banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. This first volume of Miller's famed, notorious collage of memoir and fiction chronicles with unapologetic gusto the adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they encounter in Paris in the 1930s. 318p.

Winner of the 1964 Newbery Medal. Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure - one that will threaten their lives and the universe. 247p. (Ages: 12 & up).

At New York City's Central Park Zoo, two male penguins fall in love and start a family by taking turns sitting on an abandoned egg until it hatches.

(City Lights Pocket Poets series). Allen Ginsberg's poem, 'Howl,' landed on the shores of America's shipwrecked consciousness as a manifesto and testimony. The book, HOWL AND OTHER POEMS, was subsequently seized by U.S. customs and the San Francisco police. It was the subject of a long court trial at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene. Ginsberg knew what was obscene, and he wrote it down in a delirious, impassioned fit of poetic reverie. It is both THE legendary and notorious poem of 20th-century American literature. Bibliography. 60p.

As ferociously fresh as it was more than a half century ago, ANIMAL FARM is a parable about would-be liberators everywhere. In witnessing the rise and bloody fall of these revolutionary animals through the lens of human history, the seeds of totalitarianism in the most idealistic organizations are visible; and in the most charismatic leaders, the souls of the cruelest oppressors appear. 101p.