Desire
Page 1
DESIRE
100 of Literature’s Sexiest Stories
chosen by
Mariella Frostrup
and the Erotic Review
Start Reading
About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
About Desire
Strict mistresses, naughty maids, handsome gardeners and disarming strangers; literature is awash with love, sex and desire. This collection brings together 100 of the best examples, hand-picked by Mariella Frostrup and the Erotic Review.
From romance and seduction to downright dirty deeds, here are prize-winners, bestsellers and rising stars, each of whom prove that when it comes to the bedroom, a little fiction goes a long way.
So whether you’re looking for love, lust or something in between, this gorgeous anthology is the perfect gift... or bedside companion.
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
About Desire
Foreword
Introduction
Awakening Desire
Anonymous
from Eveline
Rudyard Kipling
First Dawn
Kate Chopin
A Respectable Woman
Anonymous
from A Night in a Moorish Harem
Bram Stoker
from Dracula
D. H. Lawrence
from Lady Chatterley’s Lover
John Fowles
from The Magus
Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber
Angela Carter
The Company of Wolves
Patricia Highsmith
from Carol
Alice Munro
Bardon Bus
Luke Jennings
Serena
Henri Breton
The Disappearing Island
Justine Dubois
San Sebastian
Justine Dubois
Torn Lace
Rebecca Chance
Gluttony
Roger Moineau
Coming Swimmingly
Alessandra Rivalta
The Perfect Italian Wife
Harriet Warner
A Bed for the Night
Diana Gabaldon
Revelations of the Bridal Chamber
John Gibb
Blind Love
John Gibb
Green
Francis Dean
The Elegant Duchess
Adnan Mahmutović
Fatima
Paullina Simons
from The Bronze Horseman
Edward Field
Forbidden Arias
Primula Bond
from The Silver Chain
Emma Donoghue
The Tale of the Rose
Jodi Ellen Malpas
from This Man
Ali May
When it Gets Hot in Tehran
John Gibb
Four in Hand
Nina Gibb
On the Beach
Ruby McNally
The Midwesterners
Anna Maconochie
What Have I to Do With You?
Veronica Cancio De Grandy
Pears and Silk
Laurence Klavan
The Witness
Burning Desire
John Cleland
from Fanny Hill
Kate Percival
from The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival, the Belle of the Delaware
James Joyce
from Ulysses
Henry Miller
from Quiet Days in Clichy
Roald Dahl
The Great Switcheroo
Anne Rice
from The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Roberta Latow
from Three Rivers
Alan Hollinghurst
from The Swimming-Pool Library
Anaïs Nin
A Model
Luke Jennings
Small Talk
Elizabeth Speller
Thought Waves
Louise Welsh
The Worm on the Bud
Louise Black
Grammar Lessons
Justine Dubois
Dorchester Evening
Nikki Gemmell
from The Bride Stripped Bare
Helen Cross
Pull
Andrew Crumey
Vox Vulva
Michel Faber
Bed & Breakfast
Nikki Gemmell
Nevertire
Louise Welsh
Belle and Sylvie
Katie Kelly
Summer
Alex Chambers
The Selfish Giantess
Garry Stewart
Off the Road
Nnenna Marcia
House Keeping
Nnenna Marcia
Mrs Salad Woman
Malachi O’Doherty
Love Me, Love My Wife
LaShonda Katrice Burnett
The Art of Losing
Kass Goldsworthy
Commute
Kass Goldsworthy
This Is What It’s Like
Charlotte Stein
from Intrusion
Neville Elder
The Red House
Arlene Heyman
The Loves of Her Life
Darkest Desire
Marquis de Sade
from Justine
Guillaume Apollinaire
from Memoirs of a Young Rakehill
Georges Bataille
The Antique Wardrobe
Pauline Réage
from Story of O
Sebastion Gray
from The Slit
Alina Reyes
from Behind Closed Doors
Michel Houellebecq
from Atomised
Henri Breton
The Devil’s Whisper
Michel Faber
The Perfect W
Lucy Golden
Hannah’s Tale – Flat
Geoff Nicholson
Glove Story
Christine Pountney
Mean Streak
Christine Pountney
The Cat that Got the Cream
David Henry Sterry
The Snow Leopard
Mitzi Szereto
Moonburn
Harriet Warner
Burning Desire
Anne Billson
Dead Girls
Angelica Jacob
This Year at Marienbad
Geoff Nicholson
California Streamin’
D. B. C. Pierre
Lust
Helen Walsh
Men and Motors
Helen Walsh
You’ve Been Framed
Lucy Golden
Finny’s Tale – The Creature in the Garden
Katie Kelly
Let’s Put This to Bed
A. F. Harrold
The Boys
Nicholson Baker
Shandee Finds Dave’s Arm
Fulani
The Phenomenology of the Whip (Porn Mix)
Danielle Schloss
Park Antics
Ortensia Visconti
Tokyo
Tiffany Reisz
from The Saint
Jo Mazelis
Rose Madder and the Silken Robe
Christopher Peachment
The Man Also Rises
About the Artwork
About Mariella Frostrup
Also Available from Head of Zeus
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Extended Copyright
Foreword
In a world saturated with se
xual imagery a new anthology of erotic stories might appear superfluous. With real sex in every manifestation available at the click of a mouse on the World Wide Web, who would bother reading (itself considered a prehistoric activity in some quarters) fictional descriptions of other people’s sexual adventures? Perhaps I’m just one of a tiny minority; for me it’s rather like asking if you have real sex, why you’d bother wasting your thoughts on sexual fantasies?
My first introduction to the erotic world was the proverbial fumble behind the bike shed, but that furtive initiation arrived in tandem with stories I’d unearthed among my parents seemingly dreary tomes at home – illicit material beyond my wildest imaginings. Back in the 1970’s, long before you could log on and find every variety of sexual act performed by the poor and downtrodden, the desperate and the dispossessed, sex was available predominately on the page.
The obscenity trial for Lady Chatterley had taken place just two years before I was born, and so, only fifteen years later, I turned to D. H. Lawrence and his hirsute, brooding heroes with their overwhelming desires to try and unlock the secrets of the sensual universe. It was in my father’s smoke-filled study that I happened upon The Virgin and the Gypsy as a precocious thirteen year old, and devoured descriptions of the flighty Yvette’s passion for the eponymous gypsy, loping past on ‘flexible hips’. I knew exactly what he was getting at when he described ‘the curious dark, suave purity of all his body, outlined in the green jersey: a purity like a living sneer’. I’d already met a boy just like that. Every single Lawrencium syllable suggested a sexual tryst of a dangerous, convention-defying variety.
Next came Anaïs Nin, purloined from my mother’s bedside table, whose Delta of Venus transported me to a world long passed and physical sensations I was only just discovering. I luxuriated in her conjured world of sex, oblivion and depravity, and still occasionally enjoy an imaginative flight to the same territory. A pioneer of early female erotic writing (of which there is still nowhere near enough), Nin’s racy Parisian literary life, passionate affair with Henry Miller and need to make a buck or two, led to her penning prolific amounts of page-turning, pitch-perfect, purple prose. Her sensual world, suffused with the heady scent of 1920’s opium dens, delved into very dark territory, including incest and paedophilia – topics wholly unpalatable in today’s more enlightened society, but her prose remains sublime. Where Lawrence alluded to sex and class, power and subjugation, Nin described, in great physical detail, how all those elements were brought into play in our expressions of sexuality.
These two writers formed my early sexual education, revealing the power of the mind to transport you to places, situations and stimulations that you might avoid in real life, but can safely embrace cerebrally. As human beings, our ability to imagine things we refrain from doing is more impressive than our capacity for doing things we can’t imagine. The state of human arousal is far more closely connected to a world we conjure than the one in which we spend our daily lives. The best sex, even while you’re physically engaged in doing it, involves an ability to rise above the mechanics. Or is this just a woman’s point of view?
Our engagement with, and attitude to, physical passion can seem the one area where men and women really do come from different planets. The products of the contemporary, male-dominated porn industry, with its relentless pounding and abusing of female bodies via every orifice and in positions even the Kamasutra failed to dream up, suggests so. This century’s visual pornography, featuring sex as gymnastics with extra lashings of masochism, sadism, or both, seems to have evolved little from the last century, apart from in its abundance. Pornography may do the trick, but through a criminal lack of imagination it renders sex as just another physical activity, like jogging with benefits.
Over the course of my lifetime, the place of sex in our lives has changed immeasurably; once obscured behind closed doors and quivering net curtains, it has become a ubiquitous driving force of the commercial world. Sex sells, and its omnipresence in everything from perfume adverts to pop songs feels close to saturation. Yet is the world a sexier place? Are more of us having sex? Or are we so busy on our smartphones, working twenty-hour days and keeping up with social media, that sex has slipped to the bottom of our to do lists – and even then it is, increasingly, relegated to an online spectator sport.
If conversations with friends and the wider correspondence I receive for my Observer ‘Dear Mariella’ column can be counted as evidence, the prolificacy of pornography is actually becoming a turn off for the over-exposed. Once, as teenagers ourselves, the scent of sex, the possibility of passion, the longing for love, suffused every moment of our waking lives. Now, we watch our children step gingerly into that seductive, all-consuming period of their lives, and the sex they’ll encounter if, like the majority of their generation they seek illumination online, will be graphic, often violent and leave little to the imagination. That for me is the tragedy of their introduction into the world of Eros. Rather than rummaging through their parents’ books to find mention of any-thing even vaguely reflecting the fires they start to feel burning, they’re given a full frontal view from day one.
Not that literature necessarily provides a softer way in – the stories collected here can’t be regarded as tame, or a young person’s guide. This collection is strictly for adults only, though I confess to employing a degree of censorship. With sexual violence so predominant in our news bulletins, I was eager to keep this an abuse- and crime-free zone, despite my belief that dark fantasies can be an outlet for hidden demons, not a trigger for creating real-life monsters. We all have fantasies we’d be ashamed to admit and are reluctant to entertain, but also the capacity for restraint and self-analysis. Hopefully, the stories you’ll encounter in this anthology will be shocking, but also entertaining, immersive, seductive and downright dirty.
These are tall tales penned by writers skilled in the art of evoking sexual desire in all its visceral and varied glory. Personally, I’m not particularly interested in watching other people have sex, but I’ve always enjoyed imagining it. We sit on trains and imagine sex with strangers, catch someone’s eye across a room and feel a frisson that sets our imaginative juices flowing. We imagine actors in movies, liberated from the confines of the story entering an adventure of our own creation and lie in bed during the bleak mid-winter thinking about sun-kissed sex on tropical beaches. The minute we stop imagining sex, our ability to enjoy it is, surely, also diminished.
Increasingly, behavioural links are being drawn between teenagers and adults at midlife and, for me, one of the most compelling examples of this connection is when it comes to sex. For decades we are busy doing it and nursing the products of our procreative impulses, and then, as in adolescence, sex either becomes a rarity or returns to occupy the imagination as it did during our prepubescent days.
In my lifetime the world has grown into an endlessly literal place; everything is available, exposure is graphic and nothing is left to our imaginations. That’s where erotica has an important role to play. Stories with a beginning, a middle and a climax have existed since human beings first learnt to express themselves in words. This diverse collection of such stories, old and new, runs the gamut from romantic to bizarre, the amusingly old-fashioned to the futuristic. In these stories, a woman is ravaged at a fancy dress party by two guests in gorilla suits; a married couple perform for onlookers by a Scottish loch; a frustrated housewife seduces her driver on a scorching road trip through the Australian desert; a tennis lesson descends into chaotic coupling. Servants will be ravished in anonymous tales from the 19th century; lesbians will be reluctantly unfaithful; men will suffer the agonies of their enormous erections. We will be exposed to frotting on an Iranian bus, an African maid stepping in for her mistress and a wealthy west London couple getting more than they bargained for when they fork out for a garden statue.
*
In the course of editing this anthology I’ve become adept at reading graphic sex in the company of total strangers and leav
ing them none the wiser. It’s quite a challenge to keep your expression neutral, commuting on Great Western Railways, reading about an eight inch ‘succubus’ pleasuring his powerdressing corporate mistress. Contained here are laughs and shocks, filthy talk and funny scenarios and, hopefully, like the promise of a multiplex pick ‘n’ mix, something for everyone.
Selecting these stories reminded me of the all-consuming passion of my teenage years, returned me to a heady erotic world I’d become somewhat estranged from and reawakened my interest in this intimate and ancient form of literary pleasure. I hope those of you reading will be similarly seduced.
Mariella Frostrup
October 2016
Introduction
It has been said that ‘one man’s erotica is another’s pornography’. Really? Today, post-Fifty Shades of Grey and YouPorn.com, this can no longer hold true: whether we hate it or love it, whether we are inured to it or not, pornography has lost pretty much all of its power to shock. Now, for many readers, Julie Burchill’s long-standing contempt for ‘erotica’ has been vindicated: the word has finally acquired a genteel, middle-class patina. Moreover, had we paid any heed to this old saw whilst selecting stories for Desire: 100 of Literature’s Sexiest Stories, it would have introduced some unwelcome inhibitions. So, significantly, the word ‘erotic’ is absent from the title. Instead, we’ve used the word ‘sexy’. Though perhaps a little pedestrian, I still find this a more honest and inclusive adjective, and I’m content to leave the debate of what is erotic and what is pornographic to the people who so love to take issue with those words.