It's Hard to Believe This Book Exists. It's Harder to Believe It Was Assigned to a College Class.

Editor's note: The story below will undoubtedly shock many readers. Some might doubt its authenticity or suggest it is a hoax. It's not. In the following story we will name the title of a book you likely will have a hard time believing exists. 

Before you go any further — THIS IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY TO STOP READING NOW.

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Professor Jordan Smith. (Image source: CSU Long Beach)

A California professor at a public university is defending his decision to assign a book titled "The Baby Jesus Butt Plug" to his literature class last week.

Professor Jordan Smith at California State University, Long Beach confirmed to TheBlaze in an email that he assigned the 104-page book to his Comic Spirit class after a student suggested they read it.

"I assigned a reader of Bizarro Fiction, a new genre of surreal gross-out literature in the United States--I didn't assign this story in the usual top-down manner of university classes: this was a democratic choice," he said, adding that the "students selected it in a class vote."

According to online bookseller Amazon, the book asks readers to "step into a dark and absurd world where human beings are slaves to corporations, people are photocopied instead of born, and the baby jesus is a very popular anal probe."

Editorial reviews describe the book as "trashy and dark" to a "strange, bleak and utterly weird tale" that should be classified as "psuedo-horror, sci-fi, twisted religion and dark satire."

"The Baby Jesus Butt Plug" was assigned reading in a California public university course. (Image source: Amazon)

But, Smith insists the book provided his class with great academic value even after he "warned them against it at first."

"[T]he conversation we had about the story was extremely productive, and brought us to analyze social constructions of definitions of 'normalcy' and the 'natural' and to explore psychological readings of the text in terms of sexual prohibitions, Christianity in American culture, comparative religious studies and much more," he said.

"Undergraduate education is about finding your voice and clarifying your values, and allowing the students to vote on whether they would rather tackle a difficulty, potentially-offensive text in a literature course is certainly one of the ways to facilitate that," the professor added.

The previous week, Smith assigned a reading titled "The Curious Sofa," which is described online as a "pornographic horror story."

A representative for the university refused multiple requests for comment from TheBlaze.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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