Banned Book Club: “The Master & Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov

Few novels carry their own censorship history as vividly as "The Master and Margarita," the pick for Bookstore1Sarasota's Banned Book Club, a monthly group devoted to reading and defending important books that have been threatened. Mikhail Bulgakov worked on it from the late 1920s until his death in 1940. It then waited more than a quarter century to appear, heavily cut, in a Soviet magazine. The plot sends the Devil, disguised as a foreign professor of black magic, into Stalin-era Moscow with an outlandish entourage, while a novel within the novel retells Pontius Pilate's encounter with Yeshua. The result is savage satire wrapped in slapstick and romance.