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Some Like It Hot: Literary
A guide to steamy romance and erotica at the Valley Cottage Library.
Nicholson Baker
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House of Holes by
ISBN: 9781439189511Publication Date: 2011A mind-blowing, sex-positive escapade: Baker takes us to a surreal but familiar world, where carnal improprieties you may have imagined, and some weird ones you probably haven't, are cheerfully fulfilled.
J.G. Ballard
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Crash by
ISBN: 9780312420338Publication Date: 2001In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor.
Robert Olen Butler
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Intercourse: Stories by
ISBN: 9780811863575Publication Date: 2008A provocative new short-story collection from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler,Intercourse delightfully reveals what goes through a person's mind at a crucial moment during sex. Smart, provocative, subtle, and erotic, each story is a many faceted gem.
Helen DeWitt
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Lightning Rods by
ISBN: 9780811219433Publication Date: 2011All I want is to be a success. That's all I ask. Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then fails to sell a single Electrolux. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet for his frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brainstorm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top - and to the very heart of corporate insanity - with an outrageous solution to the spectre of sexual harassment in the modern office.
Erica Jong
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Fear of Flying by
ISBN: 9780030107313Publication Date: 1973Isadora Wing was afraid of flying. She was also afraid of her own beauty, brains, physical appetites, and intellectual curiosity. Then, while on a trip to Vienna with her brilliant, handsome psychiatrist husband, Isadora met the man who embodied her most erotic fantasies-and who offered her a chance to conquer all her fears. What happened to Isadora then was a wild, sexually extravegant bold across Europe that had worldwide reverberations-in the most uninhibited, delicious, wonderfully witty, erotic novel a woman ever wrote. This is the classic novel that changed the landscape of American fiction forever.
D.H. Lawrence
Henry Miller
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Tropic of Cancer by
ISBN: 9780802131782Publication Date: 1987Initially banned in America as obscene, Tropic of Cancer was first published in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards permitted its publication. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century."
Walter Mosely
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Killing Johnny Fry by
ISBN: 9781596912267Publication Date: 2006Killing Johnny Fryis the story of Cordell's dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. His guide is a mysterious woman named Sisypha, who leads him deep into the erotic heart of the city. It will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you blush. Above all, it is about a man questioning the rules we take for granted--and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur between people when these rules are removed.
Pauline Reage
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Story of O by
ISBN: 9781562010355Publication Date: 1993O is a young, beautiful fashion photographer in Paris. One day her lover, Rene, takes her to a chateau, where she is enslaved, with Rene's approval, and systematically sexually assaulted by various other men. Later, Rene turns O over to Sir Stephen, an English friend who intensifies the brutality. But the final humiliation is yet to come.
Anne Rice (Writing as A.N. Roquelaure)
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The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by
ISBN: 9780452281424Publication Date: 1999Before E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey and Sylvia Day's Bared to You, there was Anne Rice's New York Times best seller The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty In the traditional folktale of "Sleeping Beauty," the spell cast upon the lovely young princess and everyone in her castle can only be broken by the kiss of a Prince. It is an ancient story, one that originally emerged from and still deeply disturbs the mind's unconscious. In the first book of the series, Anne Rice (author of Beauty's Kingdom), writing as A.N. Roquelaure, retells the Beauty story and probes the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive tale by exploring its undeniable connection to sexual desire. Here the Prince awakens Beauty, not with a kiss, but with sexual initiation. His reward for ending the hundred years of enchantment is Beauty's complete and total enslavement to him . . . as Anne Rice explores the world of erotic yearning and fantasy in a classic that becomes, with her skillful pen, a compelling experience. Readers of Fifty Shades of Grey will indulge in Rice's deft storytelling and imaginative eroticism, a sure-to-be classic for years to come. "Articulate, baroque, and fashionably pornographic." --Playboy "Something very special . . . at once so light and yet so haunting." --The Advocate -
Beauty's Punishment by
ISBN: 9780452281431Publication Date: 1999The delicious and erotically charged sequel toThe Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Now Beauty, having indulged in a secret and forbidden infatuation with the rebellious slave Prince Tristan, is sent away from the Satyricon-like world of the Castle. Sold at auction, she will soon experience the tantalizing punishments of "the village," as her education in love, cruelty, dominance, submission, and tenderness is turned over to the brazenly handsome Captain of the Guard. -
Beauty's Release by
ISBN: 9780452281455Publication Date: 1999In the final volume of Anne Rice's deliciously tantalizing erotic trilogy, Beauty's adventures on the dark side of sexuality makes her the bound captive of an Eastern Sultan and a prisoner in the exotic confines of the harem. As this voluptuous adult fairy tale moves toward conclusion, all Beauty's encounters with the myriad variations of sexual fantasy are presented in a sensuous, rich prose that intensifies this exquisite rendition of Love's secret world, and makes the Beauty series and incomparable study of erotica.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
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Venus in Furs by
ISBN: 9780007300464Publication Date: 2009Severin is a young Galician nobleman with a secret; he can only love a woman with a ruthless heart, who will rain her whip upon him in a shower of bloody kisses. When he meets Wanda, the wealthy and beautiful widow living in the apartment upstairs, he wonders if she might be the one to help him realize his darkest desires. But Wanda is better than he ever dreamed possible at domination and soon Severin realizes he is powerless to escape what he has begun. Here, fantasy and reality writhe together in a ceaseless, fraught embrace. First published in 1870, the author defined, and unwittingly gave his own name to, that sexual proclivity we know as masochism in this understated, charged erotic classic.
Marquis de Sade
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Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings by
ISBN: 9780802132185Publication Date: 1994No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century--from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Kafka--is indisputable. This volume contains Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugénie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine. This literary portrait of Sade is completed by one of his earliest philosophical efforts, Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, a selection of his letters, a fifty-page chronology of his life, two important essays on Sade, and a bibliography of his work.
Mario Varga Llosa
Jeannette Winterson
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Written on the Body by
ISBN: 9780679744474Publication Date: 1994The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. "At once a love story and a philosophical meditation."--New York Times Book Review.