Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Penguin) chronicles the history of censorship surrounding the publication of Ulysses for its seemingly seditious, immoral content. “Obscenity” remains as illegal today as it was in 1922, but the Joyce trials changed how we define what can be considered obscene. If a book is so good, so ingeniously and beautifully written, is obscenity transformed into art?
Read an excerpt from The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses.