Yet Another Top 10 List – Smutty Books

After yet another night on the town and a variety of noxious alcoholic medleys I woke up this morning feeling malcontent, maladroit and morbidly hungover. I was going to – very audaciously – vow to stay off the booze for the remainder of February but then realised it was Valentine’s Day and I would certainly need something 20 proof and above to get me through it. That and some books, perhaps, of the smutty variety for it is somehow both appropriate and inappropriate to be reading smut on this merchant-made capitalist abomination of days.

So in case you’re feeling a little bit like me here’s a list of some literary smut, arranged in alphabetic order by the first letter of the writer’s surname. The list is by no means comprehensive and reflects my own reading preferences and prejudices. So, friends, say NO to Hallmark and Cadbury and go buy one of the below! Or tell me what would be on your list.

Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan
“What’s beautiful is to refuse to let yourself stop, sit down, fall asleep, or look back.”

Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
“We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.”

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter
“I desire therefore I exist.”

The Ripening Seed by Colette
“One would have to be a raving lunatic to try to find out what a woman wants, or to imagine that she knows herself!”

Querelle of Brest by Jean Genet
“When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.”

Sexus by Henry Miller
“To love or be loved is no crime. The really criminal thing is to be make a person believe that he or she is the only one you could ever love.”

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

Story of O by Pauline Réage
“Finally a woman confesses! Confess what? What women never allowed themselves to confess!”

Philosophy in the Boudoir or The Immoral Mentors by Marquis de Sade
“Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.”

Source: GoodReads, Wikipedia

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Writers On Writers

“If I were to read, cold, something by Anaïs Nin, I would probably say that it was written by a man trying to write as a woman.”
Joan Didion

“Spinoza’s ‘human bondage’ is the condition of one who identifies himself with his own desires, emotions and thought processes.”
Patrick White

“I admire Salman for his work and his courage, and I respect his stand.”
John le Carré

“I was being forced to read Henry James at school. I hated it. With the result that James became one of my favourite writers.”
Jeffrey Eugenides

“One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.”
Randall Jarrell

“This general inspissation of the Sacks worldview can seem both stimulating and disturbing.”
Will Self

“I have often thought Ian McEwan a writer as unlike me as it is possible to be.”
Zadie Smith

“If you’re trying to finish a book, steer clear of Nabokov—he’ll make you feel like a clodhopper.”
David Mitchell

“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money.”
W.H Auden

“Larkin was a person who had profound and unforgettable things to say about common experience.”
Andrew Motion

Sources: Guardian, Wikiquote, The Believer, The Paris Review