Intimacy tinged with life and death.
Explore books on intimacy tinged with life and death, from Toni Morrison's Beloved to Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy. A curated list blending passion, mortality, and erotic fiction.
![Breaking the Waves [DVD] Cover](https://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/6305899681.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
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Erotism
by Georges Bataille
Reprint. Originally published: Death and sensuality. New York: Walker, 1962.
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Eat Me
by Linda Jaivin
In this eye-popping first novel--a bestseller in both the United States and Australia--Linda Jaivin invites readers to overhear what women really talk about when they talk about sex. When four bright, successful friends meet in Sydney's designer cafés and restaurants to gossip about their romantic exploits, the talk sizzles. Julia, Chantal, Helen, and Phillipa are the best of friends. Professionally, their lives could not be more different, but whenever they get together, there are always plenty of intimate revelations to dish up and devour. Julia is a spunky photographer with a penchant for Peking duck and younger men; Chantal is a fashion magazine editor whose sexual preferences give new meaning to the words "mixing and matching"; Helen is a feminist scholar whose outward wholesomeness belies her inner naughtiness; and Phillipa is a somewhat secretive writer who appears to be taking rather close notes on her friends' raunchy tales. This outrageous, irresistible, and utterly original debut, which led Entertainment Weekly to call Jaivin "one of the 100 most creative people in entertainment," is the juiciest book you will read this year.
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Lost Girls
by Alan Moore
Can pornography be art? Can an erotic graphic novel have literary merit? Can both men and women enjoy explicit images? Moore and Gebbie set out to answer these difficult and ambitious questions in Lost Girls, a 240-page fully painted story that has been in the works for over a decade. Like he did in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore revisits characters from Victorian fiction, this time children's literature. The three protagonists are fictitiously based on the familiar faces from Wonderland, Oz, and Neverland, who meet as grown women in a mysterious hotel in 1913 England. There, they embark on a journey through an erotic fantasy world of their own conjuring, all rendered in Gebbie's beautifully painted, full-color art.
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The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
by A. N. Roquelaure
Before 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
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author. This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. “A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times
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Mariette in Ecstasy
by Ron Hansen
The highly acclaimed and provocatively rendered story of a young postulant's claim to divine possession and religious ecstasy.
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Love in the Ruins
by Walker Percy
Amid the decadence and polarization of a future American society, a U.S. doctor discovers a promising cure for all the ills of the human psyche.
