Some books are made of fucking—of cum and cumming, cocks, twats, and tongues, desires of all kinds. A la Gass, literature may arrive in different shades of blue: some the color of morning, an erection at sunrise, a shadow sexual tension undispersed by the night; others darkened to purple in their perversions, heavy, overwrought, fit to burst. For the prude, such books might be vulgar; the aesthete: garish; the reactionary: obscene; the fanatic: forbidden.

The state versus Molly Bloom deemed her language “unparlorlike.” In the UK, the Obscenity Act of 1959 sunk its teeth in Mr. Lawrence for a few “fucks” and “cunts.” Naturally, Nabokov, fine purveyor of pedophilia and incest, won his share of bans, for works that stand at the outer edge of linguistic profundity, and his public’s decency. Then, for a time, it seemed the dam had broken, as we moved into this century, unmoored by neo-liberalism, cavorting all we like between the pages, with naught but the odd local library acting the iron-clad censor.

So enter our fresh fallen world: in America, with 30% of our neighbors unmasked as bigots, white supremacists, and, for what seems like something of a first, self-styled vulgarians, untethered, finally, by a reality star’s innate vulgarities; and abroad, with all manner of buffoons, conmen, and plutocratic libertines taking the reins across every hemisphere, their pale faces framed, dead-eyed, on all of our screens, grinning through their malice. And, though the Left has historically held the mantle of obscenity in art and cultural life, that pride increasingly seems property of the Right, the alt-right, the fascists, who bear it happily against calls for decency, normality, and truth. Where once perversity was an aesthetic and political tool for critiquing power, for digging into its cracks to expose any rot, the obscene has now been subsumed by power itself. The emperor is naked, and his subjects adore it.

What’s to be done? Well, down with decency, I say, and bring back a version of truth-telling fiction that doubles down in its most vulgar strategies. And what better weapon to bring to this struggle against the arch xenophobes than books from outside our borders.

—a slim, strange 2016 novel by Spanish author Juan José Millás, and translated this year by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn for Bellevue Literary Press—traffics in a kind of perversity that flickers between comedy and domestic horror and, ultimately, economic alienation. The protagonist, Damián Lobo, recently fired from his job, spends all day imagining himself a celebrity on an extended TV interview. Early in the novel, the imaginary interviewer starts a line of questioning that brings Damián to the subject of his adopted Chinese step-sister, two years his senior. What starts as a sequence of questions lining up an adolescent crush in an unusual family arrangement, quickly drops into out-and-out incest. As the story progresses, Damián flees a petty theft by hiding in a wardrobe, which is in turn delivered to a family’s home. There, he becomes something like a phantom servant, cooking and cleaning and spying on the father’s hapless affair with a co-worker, until his phantomhood reaches a kind of violent apotheosis. It’s a novel where perversion leads to alienation in an absolute sense: from the bonds of a family via incest; from one’s own labor through capitalism’s rapacious march; and from personhood through a total disengagement with the world. In the end, all that’s left is a male gaze, obsessive, extreme, detached from life’s logic.

In —a 2015 novel by Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac, newly translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey for Soho Press—sex underlies the techno-evolution of capitalism, as a form of exchange, currency, and domination. A few apt scenes: the story opens on the Canary Islands in 1882; the intrepid explorer, Niklas Bruun, arrives to the hidden village of Mahan, where a fertility rite begins that will forever connect the Europeans “into the genetic history of the island in a torrent of semen and blood.” The novels second storyline introduces Cassio, a young hacker in the 80s, by-way-of the fuck that founded him. His mother, Sonia Liberman, has an affair with a Brazilian man, for whom she is exclusively a sexual object, and, naturally, a lack of protection and care leads us right to young Cassio, who grows into his own passages as an incel, for a time. In the final section, set in Bariloche, the now-techno-futurist hub of South America in 2024, a young female professional wears VR glasses and watches two Komodo dragons ravage a blonde woman in explicit detail, and masturbates. Each of the novel’s narrative strands uses sex as its own distinct critique of our ideological past, present, and future—be it colonialist, chauvinist, or techno-utopic. The sexual is always political, and this wonderful, maximalist little novel wields ribaldry like a gun aimed at capitalism’s amoral heart.

The conceptual artist Anicka Yi’s olfactory-based installation Washing Away of Wrongs (2014, created in conjunction with French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel) consists of two stainless steel dryer doors embedded into a gallery wall, each containing a motion-activated diffuser which, once the darkened portholes are unhinged, emits a lab-engineered puff meant to evoke a relationship’s nadir in terms both “abstract” and “representational,” respectively. When I initially encountered the work, however, it wasn’t by scent—or even sight—but by sound: a coterie of similarly-attired school children, on a field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art, were taking turns daring one another to get a whiff of the exhibit, scattering amid peals of tinny laughter and performative revulsion before being wrangled by their chaperones. The details of my own experience are unimportant (and too voluminous to unpack here). Instead, I’ll simply postulate that the act of opening a small doorway, shoving your oily visage into the recess, and inhaling an assortment of unsettling—possibly mind-altering—aromas is an ideal sensory analogue for reading a book. That is, the sort of book that alters your chemical composition in some imperceptible manner. The sort that infiltrates your physiological make-up, surreptitiously slipping a flounder into a ventilation duct so that weeks or months later you’re still puzzling over the source of that haunting smell. Here are five such books, ranked by the intensity of their odor profiles, from palatable to putrid.

by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (New Directions)

The surface-level environs of the corporate city-state that sprawl across Oyamada’s English-language debut are inoffensive at a glance, redolent of clinical efficiency with accent notes emanating from the industrial laundries (starchy sweetness) and casual dining options (savory tang) dotting the terrain. Beneath the sterile exteriors lie dingy, intestinal workspaces where menial tasks, notably perpetual paper-shredding, are undertaken, creating a musty mélange of recycled oxygen, bored tedium, and wood pulp. It’s when the essence of reptilian rot begins to emanate from the crevices, while hulking rodentia patrol The Factory’s brackish outer edge, that things truly begin to smell funny.

by Bjørn Rasmussen, translated by Martin Aitken (Two Lines Press)

Rasmussen’s little obliteration wastes no time in expounding on the pungent pleasures of an illicit tryst, reminiscing over “breathing that special kind of air” from the very first page. Specifically, the intoxicating inhalant being referred to in this case is a lover’s asshole, but The Skin goes much deeper than that to assemble its heady stench. The manure and urine of the stables are ever-present, alongside the musky leather of saddles and riding crops, each element blurring seamlessly with an overall genital funk (ammonia and brine) radiating from the increasingly sadistic carnal excursions. Where the stink really sets in, though, is among the more cerebral concoctions—fear, arousal, and desperation are a potent mix.

by Pola Oloixarac, translated by Roy Kesey (Soho Press)

While much of Oloixarac’s latest trawls the global tech sector for content, no Soylent-saturated incubator could hope to stand up to Dark Constellations’ hallucinatory interstitial sections concerning a motley crew of 19th-century explorers. These assorted scientists find themselves ensnared in the odoriferous bouquet of a vast cavern, surrounded by fist-sized insects and translucent crustaceans, while gaseous pockets of volcanic runoff erupt in a “night perfumed with sulfur.” The exploration culminates in a prerequisite “torrent of blood and semen” as a marathon sex ritual, followed by the guzzling of albino butterfly innards, ensues. A primordial hothouse of herbaceous depravity—and I didn’t even mention the eventual depiction of VR-assisted lizard porn which, though presumably fragrance-free, should cause all your senses to recoil in unison.

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne (Grove Press)

A nearly unparalleled entrant into the pantheon of putrescence, Del Amo’s Animalia stinks to high heaven as a matter of course. There’s no way around it, a provincial pig farm proves to be fertile ground for a grim symphony of filth and viscera, expertly exuding the kind of pore-clogging reek that permeates down to the marrow. When it isn’t offal and entrails, the novel is locked in a constant battle with its main antagonist: shit. A veritable deluge of hog shit, glutting orifices and spreading disease, threatens ruin at every turn. In its scorched-earth crescendo, the sky is choked by a miasma of charred flesh and blanketed by toxic plumes of blackened smoke. A book this revolting is unlikely to be toppled from its position as preeminent nasal offender.

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano, translated by Thomas Bunstead (Coffee House Press)

Although,ĚýRodrigo Márquez Tizano may have a thing or two to say about it. If Animalia is Hell on Earth, then Jakarta is a pissed-off Tartarus covered in napalm. Rampant pestilence in the form of “poxes, choleras, fevers, and plagues” have ravaged the population, littering the landscape with decaying corpses, as an economy ruled by vice has taken hold of what’s left. Vermin ferry the sickness from one host to the next as mangy carrion canines scavenge the remains. Waste piles up in “mountains of garbage and meat.” Societal hygiene falls victim to government regulation. Jakarta is a bile-and-brimstone grotesquerie that should absolutely be sold with a warning label attached.