Cult fiction  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Cult fiction is a term used to denote literature that has attracted a cult following.

Books that tend to attract a cult following include banned books, transgressive fiction, controversial books, erotic literature, drug literature, rants and incendiary tracts and some genre fiction. The earliest compilation of cult fiction was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (index of prohibited books) by the Catholic church.

Bibliography

• Curiosities of Literature (4 vols. 1791-1823; single vol. 1824) by Isaac D'Israeli,
• Cult Fiction: A Reader's Guide (1998) - Andrew Calcutt
• Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (1998) - Clive Bloom
• Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature (1992) - Thomas Reed Whissen
• The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (2005) - Michaela Bushell, Helen Rodiss, Paul Simpson
• Anthology of Black Humor (1940) - André Breton
• Christchurch's list of cult authors

Examples of cult books

• Anti-Œdipus (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari)
• Atomised (Michel Houellebecq)
• The Atrocity Exhibition (J. G. Ballard)
• The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
• Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
• The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)
• A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
• The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)
• Dispatches (Michael Herr)
• The Doors of Perception (Aldous Huxley)
• Dune (Frank Herbert)
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe)
• Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson)
• The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer)
• Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)
• Food of the Gods (Terence McKenna)
• The Function of the Orgasm (Wilhelm Reich)
• Gaia (James Lovelock)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter)
• The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy (Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea)
• Journey to the End of the Night (Louis-Ferdinand Céline)
• Laws of Form (G. Spencer-Brown)
• Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier)
• Less Than Zero (Brett Easton Ellis)
• The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)
• Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs)
• Neuromancer (William Gibson)
• One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
• On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
• The Outsider (Albert Camus)
• Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)
• Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
• The Storm of Steel (Ernst Jünger)
• The Story of the Eye (Georges Bataille)
• Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert A. Heinlein)
• The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Carlos Castaneda)
• Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
• Trout Fishing in America (Richard Brautigan)
• The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks)
• White Noise (Don DeLillo)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)

See also

• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
• Cult classic