/lit/ - Literature

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/books/review/the-naughty-bits.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

"GEOFF DYER: Sex scenes are difficult to write partly because the choice of verbs and nouns is so limited. You can mint new verbs — one of Martin Amis’s characters speaks of having “Mailered” a woman — but this tends to take us into the realm of comedy, and sex, if it’s going well, is not comic."

"RACHEL KUSHNER: I don’t think of sex as any more difficult to write about than any other human behavior. Writers fail or soar at anything. Everyone thinks about sex, engages in it. It’s the secret we all share."

"TONI BENTLEY: It is not difficult to write about sex. It is impossible."

"EDMUND WHITE: Most middlebrow or highbrow writers avoid sex scenes as somehow tacky or distracting or beyond their powers. I myself like to write them, whether heterosexual or male homosexual, because they strike me as among life’s peak experiences, along with dying and death, one’s first “Ring” cycle and a first gondola ride through Venice."

"CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE: Because most cultures link sexuality — especially women’s sexuality — with shame, I am drawn to sex scenes that are frank and demonstrate a willingness to be foolish, a lack of too much irony, a sense of humor, which may not be overt on the page but comes across in the telling."

"SAM LIPSYTE: There’s a story I like to tell, about when my father took me to a used-book store near our home in New Jersey. I must have been 12 or 13.
“Go pick out a book,” my father said. “Anything you want.”
I scurried off to make my selection. God knows what I was reading then, it was all a jumble. I was drawn to books by big literary names as long as they had somewhat lurid covers. But that day I struck gold: the novelization of the movie “Caligula,” by William Howard, based on Gore Vidal’s screenplay. Seemed pretty literary to me, and when I opened it up I immediately hit upon a string of quite accessible and extremely lascivious sentences. A few pages on and it was orgy time. I flipped back and forth through the book, togas falling everywhere. And if it wasn’t wild Roman sex, it was insane Roman violence. Chocolate in my peanut butter, from my adolescent vantage. I ran up to the register. The clerk saw the book.
“Sir,” she said. “I don’t think you want your son to have that book.”
“Why not?” my father said.
“Well. . . . " she said, and tried to explain.
“The hell with that,” my father said. “That’s censorship. You can’t go around telling me what my son can and can’t read.”
It was at that moment that I understood what a strange and wonderful father I had. Later, of course, when he realized what had occurred along with the triumph of free speech, he demanded the smutty book back, but I convinced him I’d lost the thing. It stayed under my bed for a long time, like a secret friend who never fails to shock and dazzle, until he does."

Fanny Hill

Does anyone actually get turned on by erotic literature and slashfic?

Is there any good erotic literature?

is fannie hill fapable?

>As he stood on one side, for a minute or so, unbuttoning his waist-coat and breeches, her fat, brawny thighs hung down, and the whole greasy landscape lay fairly open to my view; a wide open-mouth'd gap, overshaded with a grizzly bush, seemed held out like a beggar's wallet for its provision.

This is a funny book.