Kicking off Write Brain TV’s month-long expedition uncovering banned, suppressed, and prohibited works of art, we proudly present this collection of forbidden classics. Infamous French libertine Marquis De Sade’s blasphemous 120 Days of Sodom (written in 1785, published in 1904) details a debaucherously vicious and violent four-month orgy commissioned by four powerful men; a noble, a clergyman, a barrister, and a finance minister. 

German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s Baal (written in 1918, first performed in 1923) tells the tale of the titular drunken scoundrel/poet (named after an ancient god of war and fertility) who carelessly carouses about the German countryside, seducing young maidens and brawling with other ne’er-do-wells. 

 Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) is a melancholic Modernist story, written in diary-form, of a social outcast named Antoine who desperately struggles to find a cure for the lingering “sweetish sickness” that ails him whenever he is in public. Unable to find interest or value in other people, Sartre’s protagonist is driven into existential crisis while trying to finish a writing assignment in a seaport town. 

 Naked Lunch (1959) by William S. Burroughs is a non-linear surrealist dystopian satire that follows William Lee as he flees New York to avoid a drug arrest, ending up in Interzone, a fictitious town overfilled with political strife and black market drugs. 

 And Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) is a six-part ultra-transgressive novel written in a thrilling, decidedly non-literary style. Eschewing grammatical conventions and utilizing conversational, stream-of-consciousness gutter-speak, Selby writes about the everyday realities he witnessed; violence, drug use, prostitution, and rape.