Blake Butler—

Some say Thomas Pynchon got nabbed of the 1974 Pulitzer for Gravity’s Rainbow due to a majority of the presiding panel’s distaste for his scene where our hero eats feces out of the ass of a prostitute (not to mention a very particular description of what sort of whose anatomy the protruding waste reminds our hero of). Indeed, it’s a pretty hard scene to shake after reading. What are some of the scenes in books that are most indelibly in your mind, and what do you think it is about them that makes them stick there?