Over the past year, politicians on the right have railed against the supposed tyranny of political correctness. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that as 2016 draws to a close, arguably the most obscene and offensive work of fiction ever written – a work that claims to “say everything” – is going to be sold in America as a mainstream classic for the first time. My new translation of the Marquis de Sade’s “The 120 Days of Sodom” with Thomas Wynn is the first in 60 years. Sade has had a long and colorful history in the United States, and his controversial works were at the center of midcentury debates about censorship. Later, they became a flashpoint in the “porn wars” of the 1970s and 1980s. Now American readers will get to decide whether Sade’s most extreme novel has truly become a literary classic.
-The Conversation
