Sex!

[Adagio]

Enticing topic title ay ;)
I'm looking for novels that deal with sexual relationships or sexual affairs, a bit similar to Lady Chatterley's. I'm not looking for trashy literature by any means. Can anyone recommend some great reads that deal with this theme, please?

[Janine]

I hope you don't get thrown off the forum, Adagio, with that title; I guess I was curious enough to click on it, to see what it was all about. I would say read Ibsen's "Ghosts". In it's day, it was quite shocking. Others of Lawrence's books deal with sex pretty blantantly; "Women in Love" and "Sons and Lovers" come to mind. I thought they were more sexually/sensually just as charged as LCL. Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" deals a lot with sexual awakening, too.

[Niamh]

Madame Bovary.

[mono]

At first, I thought this would regard Madonna's book, Sex! :lol:
As Janine said, anything by D.H. Lawrence sounds like something for you to research, including some of his short stories. Otherwise: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, maybe Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

[Scheherazade]

How about Lolita?

[sixsmith]

For something a little more, erm, extreme, you might check out Roth's "Sabbath's Theater" which very much features sexual affairs to the fore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath's_Theater


Updike's "Couples" is another that springs to mind though it's not one of his better efforts

[JBI]

David Glover's Elle. Or, how about Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel?

[wat??]

Anna Karenina

[Pecksie]

A. S. Byatt's 'Angels and Insects'.

[Lokasenna]

Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles would be well worth a look.

Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and The Merchant's Tale could offer an interesting medieval view of sex for you.

They might not be novels, but you could also look at John Donne's love poetry. Something like The Flea or The Ecstasy are very beautiful.

[LostPrincess13]

Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles would be well worth a look.

Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and The Merchant's Tale could offer an interesting medieval view of sex for you.

They might not be novels, but you could also look at John Donne's love poetry. Something like The Flea or The Ecstasy are very beautiful.

Oooh, yes, some of Donne's poetry do have sexual overtones. Took me a while to figure out The Flea when I first read it.:blush:

[prendrelemick]

Portnoy's Complaint. by Philip Roth

[TheFifthElement]

Anything written by Anais Nin or Henry Miller

[Pecksie]

Oooh, yes, some of Donne's poetry do have sexual overtones. Took me a while to figure out The Flea when I first read it.:blush:

Agreed on that. Try also 'To his Mistress, Going to Bed', which alternates between tenderness and crude eroticism... But then Donne is a marvel.

[kelby_lake]

Lolita
To His Coy Mistress (poem :) )

[Jeremiah Jazzz]

Or, how about Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel?
:lol: what an excellent read

[mono]

Oh, I forgot to mention The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio - especially for something written in its time, in the mid-1300's, it definitely has several scenes that made me blush! I cannot imagine how taboo it must have seemed in its time, but he meant it as a comedy, and it certainly had me laughing here and there - something needed during the Black Plague times. :nod:

[Janine]

Oh, I just thought of one I read that dealt with the subject. "Lady of the Camilias" by Alexander Dumas (the son of Dumas who wrote "Three Musketeers") is a very good book. A ballet and an opera was based on the book. I have seen both in DVD versions and think they are great.

[Emil Miller]

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase.

Anything by Hank Janson, who appears to be in reprint (see Googled extract below):


Steve: Ah, Hank Janson ...
'Brings back memories to me of well-thumbed paperbacks passed eagerly but surreptitiously hand to hand in UK barracks-rooms long ago ... Hank Janson [Stephen D. Francis] was a British writer of pulp paperbacks that were simply soft-porn tales under the guise of gangster novels. He wrote a couple of dozen of them, in a ludicrous "American" style that was even then seen as hilariously off-key. (Jansen shared this laughable ineptitude with American accents and slang as did James Hadley Chase [Rene Raymond] another British wannbe-Yank author of the time.] In his hey-day - 1946-1956 - Janson enjoyed large sales in the UK despite his corn-ball writing style, entirely because of their lipsmacking descriptions of female bodies and sex scenes that went as far as a British writer dared to in those days of strict censorship. Finally, Jansen just managed to avoid criminal prosecution on pornography charges, by skipping off to live in Spain. I think his publisher did serve a couple of years in jail on similar charges. It was amusing to me to see Jansen's name pop up again half a century after I last read one his paperbacks. It'll be interesting to see how reprints of his books sell now. What was considered pretty raunchy in the '40s would seem tame today compared with the almost obligatory obscenity in most books nowadays, regardless of genre

[Ghuyuran]

It seems everyone missed the most obvious and arguably, the most shocking: Marquis de Sade.

[1n50mn14]

Moll Flanders- Daniel Defoe

[Gustavo L.]

Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

[Amethyst2010]

Very recently, I tried one John Irving's book for the first time. There were explicit sex scene in the book. I was told that his work is considered literature. Sex and different kinds of sexual relationship of the 21st century could be common in his books.

[Niamh]

Tom Jones a Foundling by Feilding....

[Mark F.]

The Arabian Nights

[TheFifthElement]

The Arabian Nights

Good call!

[Desolation]

Tropic of Cancer/Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller.

Anything by William S Burroughs is bound to be filled with deeply, deeply disturbing sex scenes.

[Scheherazade]

Tales of Decameron by Boccacio

[Whifflingpin]

The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogara - Alison Fell

White Hotel etc - Thomas

Atomised etc - Houellebeqc

[Emil Miller]

The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogara - Alison Fell

White Hotel etc - Thomas

Atomised etc - Houellebeqc

I mentioned The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogara in the thread on Japanese Literature. If it were more widley known about, Alison Fell's collection of Japanese erotic stories would put Viagra out of business. That one about the giant goldfish pond was amazing.

[manolia]

"The inner circle" by T. C. Boyle was a very interesting read.

I have also heard good comments about "Teleny" by Oscar Wilde although i haven't read it.

[blp]

The Story of O (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O) by Pauline Réage. I haven't read this.

Anything by de Sade, in particular Philosophy in the Bedroom.

The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. Short, poetic and sort of disturbing. I've read it; it's great, but might be a little much for some readers. Keep out of reach of children.

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, though not primarily concerned with sex, does have an explicit scene that's key to the narrative.

[novelsryou]

Anna Karenina

Is that a difficult read?

[Mark F.]

Petrol! by Pasolini (not sure if it's been translated to English but it's great). You should also check out his films as a lot of them centre around the topic of sex. Theorem, The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, Arabian Nights, Porcile, Salo ; 120 Days of Sodom, Oedipus Rex.

[beelzebubbles]

Sexus by Henry Miller

[billl]

"The inner circle" by T. C. Boyle was a very interesting read.


Yeah, I thought that was interesting, too. I imagine people might have a wide range of reactions to it.

Here's my choice(s), two by one of my favorite authors. He's written some crap, but he was on a flawless roll from 1988 to 1994.

Nicholson Baker's The Fermata and Vox
Vox is much tamer than The Fermata. In fact, The Fermata is so out there I worry it might sway some more conservative readers from his incredible (but not especially sexy) debut The Mezzanine.

That being said The Fermata is amazingly "sexy," but [...SPOILER--MINOR SPOILER, MAYBE THIS SPOILER IS ON THE BACK OF THE PAPERBACK ACTUALLY, SO SPOILER-LITE, OK? SPOILER...]the narrator almost rivals that of Lolita--it's a guy who learns how to stop time, and does what you might imagine a nerdy young man might do. [END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER]
The bulk of the book has little to do with relationships (or even, some might argue, actual sex), and a lot of women would probably not be at all interested in this book, please be careful.

Vox is probably a better book for thinking about sex and relationships, if I remember correctly. A short book, describing a conversation with a 1-900 phone sex woman. Not all about sex, but it's good, and somewhat about sex, if I remember right.

[kelby_lake]

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. A decidedly off-putting scene...

[Michael T]

As already mentioned, anything by Anais Nin. I would mention 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' by Milan Kundera too.

[rozreads]

"Fear of Flying"- Erica Jong

[Night_Lamp]

Wow... I can't believe you guys missed 'Fanny Hill'. Its hotter than the letters section of an adult magazine. And, if you can find it, the original version of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', this was the book that got Lawrence charged with publishing pornography. The copy I have is called: 'John Thomas and Lady Jane' and was printed in Italy because no English publisher would touch it.

[jack_is_cool]

Yeah, you really wanna check out anything by de Sade. His opus magnum is 120 days of Sodom, but I believe there's much more merit to Philosophy in the Bedroom. His books are almost a case study of sexual psychopathology. You'll also gain a bit of knowledge on philosophy and psychology if you read between the lines well enough! Definitely check out de Sade.

[JuniperWoolf]

If you're not against graphic novels (which I really hope you're not, or you're totally missing out) then you've got to check out Lost Girls. He makes some pretty good points about pornography and sex in general.

Also, its not easy to make me blush, but I couldn't read American Psycho on the bus.




To His Coy Mistress (poem :) )
I liked that one. The Flea was a pretty good sex poem too, and there's a lot in Rimbaud (I REALLY recommend Rimbaud).

*edit: "I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay was a good poem too, and a good female take on sexuality which is kind of missing from sex literature. Another female perspective can be found in Sappho.

[AimusSage]

Did anyone mention crash or turkish fruit. haha, yeah

[stlukesguild]

Yeah, you really wanna check out anything by de Sade. His opus magnum is 120 days of Sodom, but I believe there's much more merit to Philosophy in the Bedroom. His books are almost a case study of sexual psychopathology. You'll also gain a bit of knowledge on philosophy and psychology if you read between the lines well enough! Definitely check out de Sade.

I'm sorry but there is about as much of literary merit in De Sade as there is in Mein Kampf... and perhaps a greater degree of the pathological.:sick:

[AimusSage]

I'm sorry but there is about as much of literary merit in De Sade as there is in Mein Kampf... and perhaps a greater degree of the pathological.:sick:
That's just rubbish what you just said, Mein Kampf doesn't feature much sex at all.

[Dark Muse]

Most the things I would think of have already been mentioned, but I would have to say

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston

The Rainbow by D.H Lawrecne

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Maquez

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

[stlukesguild]

That's just rubbish what you just said, Mein Kampf doesn't feature much sex at all.

Uh.... yeah. That would be true.:confused:

[Draemr]

The first thing that came to mind for me was 'Dangerous Liaisons,' (Les Liaisons dangereuses). If you want sexual relationships and affairs then this is the book for you. The story is told in the form of letters between the characters.