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The ReadDown

Staff Picks: Our Favorite Banned Books

We asked our staff to share their favorite books that have been banned throughout history. Celebrate the books that have made us think, allowed us to express ourselves, and given a voice to the stories and experiences within their pages. Find resources for parents, educators, and more here.

To celebrate Banned Books Week, for each book purchased on penguinrandomhouse.com from September 18 to 24, 2022, Penguin Random House will donate $1 to American Booksellers for Free Expression (up to $15,000).

  1. 1
    The Color Purple Book Cover Picture
    The Color Purple Book Cover Picture
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    The Color Purple

    by Alice Walker

    A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker’s epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.
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    $17.00

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  2. 2
    1984 Book Cover Picture
    1984 Book Cover Picture
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    1984

    by George Orwell

    A startling and haunting vision of the world, 1984 is so powerful that it is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the influence of this novel, its hold on the imaginations of multiple generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions—a legacy that seems only to grow with the passage of time.
    1984 Book Cover Picture
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    $17.00

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  3. 3
    The Bluest Eye Book Cover Picture
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    The Bluest Eye

    by Toni Morrison

    Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.
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  4. 4
    The House on Mango Street Book Cover Picture
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    The House on Mango Street

    by Sandra Cisneros

    The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous-Sandra Cisneros’ masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
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    $11.95

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  5. 5
    The Handmaid's Tale (Movie Tie-in) Book Cover Picture
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    The Handmaid’s Tale

    by Margaret Atwood

    In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.
    The Handmaid's Tale (Movie Tie-in) Book Cover Picture
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    $15.95

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  6. 6
    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Book Cover Picture
    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Book Cover Picture
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    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

    by Maya Angelou

    Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Book Cover Picture
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    $18.00

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  7. 7
    Go Tell It on the Mountain Book Cover Picture
    Go Tell It on the Mountain Book Cover Picture
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    Go Tell It on the Mountain

    by James Baldwin

    Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
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    $16.00

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  8. 8
    Slaughterhouse-Five Book Cover Picture
    Slaughterhouse-Five Book Cover Picture
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    Slaughterhouse-Five

    by Kurt Vonnegut

    Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”
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    $17.00

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  9. 9
    Invisible Man Book Cover Picture
    Invisible Man Book Cover Picture
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    Invisible Man

    by Ralph Ellison

    A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood”, and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
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    $16.00

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  10. 10
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Book Cover Picture
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Book Cover Picture
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    One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

    by Ken Kesey

    In this classic novel, Ken Kesey’s hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story’s shocking climax.
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Book Cover Picture
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    Mass Market Paperback
    $9.99

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  11. 11
    Animal Farm Book Cover Picture
    Animal Farm Book Cover Picture
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    Animal Farm

    by George Orwell

    A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.  When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.
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    $16.00

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