Sensoria
Explore Sensoria's curated reading list on books tagged sensoria—featuring provocative erotic fiction and literary classics from Jeanette Winterson, Henry Miller, and Marguerite Duras, including *Written on the Body* and *The 120 Days of Sodom*.
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The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings
by marquis de Sade
The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as "the freest spirit that has yet existed," wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration-a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud-of the psychology of sex, it is considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935. In addition to The 120 Days, this volume includes Sade's "Reflections on the Novel," his play Oxtiem, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay "Must We Burn Sade?" and Pierre Klossowski's provocative "Nature as Destructive Principle." "Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change."-From Sade's Last Will and Testament
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Story of O
by Pauline Réage
Considered a classic, this work is worthy to stand beside the best writings of the Marquis de Sade. This is an ironic and mystical tale of unfreedom that transcends the pornographic and even the erotic. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautreamont
by comte de Lautréamont
Andre Breton wrote that MALDOROR is the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.' First published in 1869, MALDOROR is the work of a mysterious genius about whom little is known aside from his birth in Uruguay, 1846, and his early death in Paris, 1870. His writings, published under the pseudonym Comte de Lautreamont, bewildered his contemporaries but have since taken their place alongside other French classics of transgression such as Sade, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. A unique translation.'
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Tropic of Capricorn
by Henry Miller
A vicious social commentary of the times and culture of the 1920's New York City.
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Written on the Body
by Jeanette Winterson
The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. “At once a love story and a philosophical meditation.” —New York Times Book Review.
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Lofting
by Alma Marceau
This is an unblushing story of Claire, a woman who finds meaning, excitement, and fulfillment through sexual abandonment. She finds a sinister but alluring guide in Nick, who is determined to reveal to Claire her own feelings that have been repressed.This novel revels in the hidden and the taboo, and at the same time is told with the utmost grace, charm, and intelligence.
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The Sleeping Beauty Novels
by A. N. Roquelaure
Beauty is sold into erotic slavery and forced to obey the orders of the Captain and Mistress Lockley.
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The North China Lover
by Marguerite Duras
A young woman growing up in Indochina experiences the humiliations and the passions of her poverty-ridden world and, like her friends, grows impatient for the experiences of adulthood while still caught up in her childhood