Modern & Classic Erotic Novels

The following titles include underground classics from the 19th century (Man With a Maid) and modern novels destine to become enduring favorites and possible future classics (The Story of O).  The page is divided into two sections: Modern Novels is a collection of titles from the early 20th century to current times, and Erotic Classics is a collection from way back in the day.

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Modern Novels:

Playing: A Novel by Melanie Abrams
Grove Press, Black Cat (April 11, 2008); ISBN-10: 0802170471

Melanie Abramss debut novel is a provocative tale about love, betrayal, and how one young womans unconventional sexual reawakening uncovers the most guarded parts of her past.

When Josie, an anthropology grad student, is unexpectedly offered a job as the nanny for six-year-old Tyler, she innocently accepts. Though Josie doesnt necessarily need the job, theres something about Tylers single mom, Mary--her beauty, her confidence, her resemblance to Josies mother--that draws Josie in. While her quick intimacy with Mary soothes Josies estrangement from her own parents, it also breeds betrayal when Josie falls for Marys crush, Devesh. An Indian surgeon ten years Josies senior, Devesh is a strong and enigmatic man who pulls Josie into a dizzying world of sexual domination and submission that speaks to her deeply hidden desires. It is a world of games that fast becomes serious, forcing Josie to confront the darkest moments of her past as she desperately struggles with her family history, her own violent impulses, and her love for Devesh.

Rapturous, illuminating, and emotionally charged, Playing is an unflinching look at the irrevocable consequences of giving in to our most secret passions, and the freedom and imprisonment that comes with true self-knowledge.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Curious Pleasures: A Gentleman's Collection of Beastliness by Erasmus St. Jude Croom
Virgin Books; First Edition edition (March 4, 2008); ISBN-10: 1905264135

It has been rumored that the finest libraries in Victorian England kept this tome under lock and key, permitting access only to doctors and professors. Scotland yard had a copy in its reference library, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself may have been allowed access to this work. and there are some  who claim that this encyclopaedic treasure of erotic pleasures—still shocking today—would cause any woman who gazed upon it to faint.

Rumor or truth? Does it matter? This ironic, tongue-in-cheek look at the naughty sexual practices of Victorian England is at once hilarious and titillating, and as explicit as ever, and includes illustrations in the style of the time. With a design that leaves some wondering whether it isn't indeed straight out of the 1890s, Curious Pleasures is as deliciously decadent as it once might have been.

About the Author: Details of Rev. Crooms life remain a mystery. What is certain is that he knew his subject.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel by Walter Mosley
Bloomsbury USA (December 26, 2007); ISBN-10: 1596912278

This bold new novel from Walter Mosley startles in both its rawness and its honest portrayal of a man on a quest for sexual redemption in midlife. When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act that he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. In that instant, the calm existence of this middle-aged New York City man becomes something unrecognizable: he wants revenge, but also something more. Killing Johnny Fry is the story of Cordell’ s dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. His guide is a mysterious woman named Sisypha, who leads him deep into the erotic heart of the city.

Killing Johnny Fry marks new territory for Walter Mosley, bestselling author of Devil in a Blue Dress and many other books in different genres: sci-fi, politics, literary fiction. It will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you blush. Above all, it is about a man questioning the rules we take for granted— and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur between people when these rules are removed.

“A frankly pornographic novel, and I mean that as a compliment.” —New York Times Book Review
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Exit to Eden by Anne Rampling (aka Anne Rice)
Avon Red; Reprint edition (September 25, 2007); ISBN-10: 0061233498

Exit to Eden was originally published in 1985, under Anne Rice's pseudonym, Anne Rampling

They call her the Perfectionist. A stunning, mysterious, and fearless sexual adventurer, Lisa is founder and supreme mistress of The Club—an exclusive island resort where forbidden fantasy meets willing flesh. Here eager participants who can afford life's most exquisite luxuries can experience the breathtaking pleasures of surrender and submission. Here nothing is taboo.

A thrill-seeking photojournalist, Elliott risks his life daily in the most dangerous, war-torn regions on Earth. Now he has come to Paradise to explore his darkest sexual self, committed to the ultimate plunge into personal risk.

Together, their journey to the limits of erotic pleasure will take them farther than they ever dreamed they'd go…
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

The Story of O by Pauline Reage
Ballantine Books; 27th Printing edition (May 12, 1981); ISBN-10: 0345301110

The classic erotic novel, THE STORY OF O relates the love of a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer for Rene. As part of that intense love, she demands debasement and severe sexual and psychological tests. It is a unique work not to be missed.

O is a young, beautiful fashion photographer in Paris. One day her lover, Rene, takes her to a chateau, where she is enslaved, with Rene's approval, and systematically sexually assaulted by various other men. Later, Rene turns O over to Sir Stephen, an English friend who intensifies the brutality. But the final humiliation is yet to come.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
Grove Press (November 10, 2004) ISBN: 0802118062

The Piano Teacher, the most famous novel of Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a shocking, searing, aching portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires.

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears to be a seamless tissue of boredom, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night to watch live sex shows and sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first, but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher's subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity, suppressed violence, and human degradation.

Celebrated throughout Europe for the intensity and frankness of her writings and awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize for her outstanding contribution to German letters, Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most original and controversial writers in the world today. The Piano Teacher was made into a film, released in the United States in 2001, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa P., Lawrence Venuti 
Grove Press; (October 10, 2004) ISBN: 0802117813

An instant blockbuster in Italy where it has sold over 700,000 copies, and now an international literary phenomenon, 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is the fictionalized memoir of Melissa P., a Sicilian teenager whose quest for love rapidly devolves into a shocking journey of sexual discovery. 

Melissa begins her diary a virgin, but a stormy affair at the age of fourteen leads her to regard sex as a means of self-discovery, and for the next two years she plunges into a succession of encounters with various partners, male and female, her age and much older, some met through schoolmates, others through newspaper ads and Internet chat rooms. In graphic detail she describes her entry into a Dante-esque underworld of eroticism, where she willingly participates in group sex and sadomasochism, as well as casual pickups. Melissa's secret life is concealed from family and friends, revealed only in her diary entries. 

Told with disarming candor, Melissa P.'s bittersweet tour of extreme desires is as poignant as it is titillating. One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is a stunning erotic debut, a Story of O for our times.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Belinda by Anne Rice
Jove Books; Reissue edition (September, 1994); ISBN: 0515093556

Jeremy Walker, a middle-aged children's book author renowned for his beautiful, old-fashioned illustrations, is captivated by a 16-year-old woman-child who tells him nothing of her past when she moves into his San Francisco home. Obsessed by Belinda's smoky sexuality, the paintings in which he celebrates her beauty are an erotic and sometimes violent extension of Jeremy's books.

Belinda is the ultimate fantasy. A golden-haired object of desire, fresh and uninhibited. But to Jeremy Walker, Belinda is a forbidden passion. She's sweet sixteen - and the most seductive woman he's ever known. When the artist discovers that his mysterious lover is the missing daughter of a famed film star, a scandalous story of anger and betrayal uncoils, and Belinda abruptly disappears. To bring her back, Jeremy makes his portraits public, unleashing a media circus and police investigation that conspire to separate them forever.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (50th Anniversary Edition)
Vintage; Reissue edition (March 13,1989); ISBN: 0679723161

Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Sleeping Beauty Novels by A. N. Roquelaure (aka Anne Rice)
New American Library; Boxed edition ISBN: 0452156610

A beautifully designed boxed set of erotica by the bestselling author. Rice's enormously successful "Beauty" books are based very loosely on the Sleeping Beauty tale, and explore just about every sexually explicit fantasy imaginable. "Articulate, baroque, and fashionably pornographic". —Playboy.

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty:  Anne Rice writing as A. N. Roquelaure. In the traditional folk tale "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. Anne Rice's retelling of the Beauty story probes the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive tale by exploring its undeniable connection to sexual desire.

Beauty's Punishment:  This sequel to The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, the first of Anne Rice's elegantly written volumes of erotica, continues her explicit, teasing exploration of the psychology of human desire. Beauty, having indulged in a secret and forbidden infatuation with the rebellious slave Prince Tristan, is sent away from the Satyricon-like world of the castle. Once again Rice's fabulous tale of pleasure and pain dares to explore the most primal and well-hidden desires of the human heart.

Beauty's Release:  In the final volume of Anne Rice's deliciously tantalizing erotic trilogy, Beauty's adventures on the dark side of sexuality make her the bound captive of an Eastern Sultan and a prisoner in the exotic confines of the harem. In Beauty's Release, Anne Rice makes the forbidden side of passion a doorway into the hidden regions of the psyche and the heart.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Safe Word: An Erotic S/M Novel by Molly Weatherfield
Cleis Press; (April 2003) ISBN: 1573441686

From the author of Carrie's Story comes the continuing tale of a young woman's uncompromising sexual adventure. Carrie leaves Jonathan, the S/M master who initiated her into a life of slave auctions, training regimes, and human "ponies" preening for dressage competitions. Whisked away to Greece by the demanding gentleman who has chosen her as his own, she learns new, more rigorous methods of sexual pleasure.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Carrie's Story by Molly Weatherfield
Cleis Pr; ISBN: 1573441562; (August 2002)

"I had been Jonathan's slave for about a year when he told me he wanted to see me at an auction. I wasn't in any condition to respond when he told me this..."

So begins Carrie's tale of uncompromising sexual adventure. Imagine the Story of O starring a Berkeley PhD in comparative lit (who moonlights as a bike messenger) with a penchant for irony, self-analysis, and anal sex. Set in San Francisco and the Napa valley, Carrie's Story takes the reader on a sexually explicit journey into a netherworld of slave auctions, training regimes, and human "ponies" preening for dressage competitions.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Erotic Classics

Havana Harlot by Pierre Motteux
Erotic Print Society, Past Venus Historical; (January 15, 2008); ISBN-10: 1904989322

The first time that Charlie Longworthy visited Cuba was in 1898 as a volunteer in Teddy Roosevelts famous Roughriders cavalry regiment when he was almost court-martialled for leaving his gun with a whore in a Havana brothel. Now its 1910 and the handsome Boston millionaire is back in Cuba with his family, carrying out a business deal and seeing the sights.

Fate deals Charlie a bad hand: his virginal daughter Helen is abducted. When he refuses to pay the ransom, photographs of her apparently violent defloration are sent. Then, in a dangerous twist, the entire family is captured by a desperate gang who think nothing of subjecting them to a whole series of sexual indignities and incestuous perversions. To save his family, Charlie must revisit his debauched past.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

The Autobiography of a Flea
Erotic Print Society; Includes illustrations by Mark Richfield

The Autobiography of a Flea was published in London around the year 1887 and is as fine a piece of late Victorian rudery as one could possibly wish for, containing more exchanges between innocent young girls, incestuous uncles, randy priests and hugely endowed peasants than you could shake a stick at.

"'What a monster! How strong it is how stiff it stands!' Father Ambrose rose, his crimson face betrayed the intensity of his desire; placing the frightened Bella in a more propitious attitude, he brought the broad red knob to the moistened aperture, and proceeded to force it inwards with a desperate effort. Pain, agitation and longing coursed each other through the nervous system of the young victim of lust."

This, indeed, is one of the rudest tales ever written, recounted by a very philosophical flea who witnesses, at close quarters, the ravishment of two innocent French girls and their subsequent life of debauchery. No sexual practice is too extreme for them, and nor does the author balk at the most graphic descriptions of their sexual ordeals; the text is surprisingly contemporary in feel.

But be warned... With its themes of evil, corrupting Catholic priests and wicked incest, this book may offend some readers.

Lustily illustrated in colour by new Canadian artist Mark Richfield.

The Autobiography of a Flea is available at the Erotic Print Society

Maids: An Erotic Anthology
Erotic Print Society; Illustrated by artists and photographers

Maids traces the history of the maid in erotic literature throughout the last two centuries, but concentrates on the maid’s golden age, the 19th century. The Victorian Maid is the stuff of erotic legend and this pert, biddable female has been at the heart of many a male sexual fantasy for almost a century and a half. Maids is divided into loosely chronological image galleries and juicy sections of text by authors ranging from well known to obscure or even to shady and anonymous. 

When we started our research for Maids we had no idea what a rich subject it would turn out to be. What emerged was a book so full of intriguing and arousing art and photography, not to mention spicy extracts from great erotic literature that it does justice to this fascinating and hugely erotic subject. Images are by a selection of artists and photographers who vary widely in their treatment of the subject. As well as a wealth of period photography, China Hamilton, Ben Westwood, Eric Wilkins and John DuPret all have contributed to make Maids the most intriguing, saucy and provocative book you’ll ever possess on the subject.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Erotic Print Society

The Romance Of Lust by Anonymous
Olympiapress.com (August 28, 2004); ISBN-10: 159654032X

The Olympia Press is glad to provide a new home to this underground classic that seldom stays out of print for long. Long banned in the U. S., The Romance of Lust is the first-person story of Charlie Roberts, the most famous hero of the Victorian sexual underground, In Volume I, Charlie began his amorous career at an early age, initiated by a married lady who was visiting his mother. Charlie soon seduced the maids, while allowing himself to be seduced by his two successive governesses and successfully passing himself off as a virgin. In Volume II, Charlie's amorous adventures begin in earnest. With almost super-human endurance he goes on to explore his taste for intricate tableaux ensembles, to indulge his penchant for fancy complications, and even to form a secret society. Spankings, floggings, and other Victorian predelictions highlight the story. An eye-opening look at the twisted paths eros takes when a society goes too far in repressing the sex drive.

This book includes several volumes, offering the complete account of Charlie Roberts, his family, his servants, his boarding school chums, his wife and his travels.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

Man With a Maid: And Other Victorian Stories by Anonymous
Circlet Press (March 1, 2004); ISBN 1885865481

This omnibus volume combines examples of the best of Victorian erotica, including

* The English Governess
* The Pearl
* The Autobiography of a Flea
* Man With A Maid, the popular Victorian classic which has sold hundreds of thousands of volumes in the 80 years since it first appeared

This volume contains some of the very best of 19th Century erotica, including "The English Governess", "The Pearl", "The Autobiography of a Flea" and many others, plus the complete text of "A Man With A Maid", the popular Victorian classic which has sold hundred of thousands of copies in the 80 years since it was first published. It tells the story of Jack, a Victorian gentleman who plots sweet revenge on the fiancee who jilts him, not to mention her maid, a close friend and his rival's mother-in-law. Setting up residence in the "snuggery", once the sound-proof room of an insane asylum, he subjects Alice and the rest of his female company to bondage and orgiastic sexuality, dealing out both pleasure and pain in equal measure.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

The Pearl by Anonymous
Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (September 29, 1996); ISBN: 0345410041

Lewd, bawdy, and sensual, this cult classic is a collection of Victorian erotica that circulated in an underground magazine known as The Pearl from July 1879 to December 1880. Now dusted off and totally uncensored, the journal of voluptuous reading that titillated the eminent Victorians is reprinted in its entirety. 

The 18 issues of The Pearl are packed with short stories, naughty poems, ballads of sexual adventure, letters, limericks, jokes, gossip, and six serialized novels including "La Rose d'Amour," filled with inventive and exotic lovemaking scenes; "Miss Coote's Confession," with graphic descriptions of initiations into pleasure; and "Young Beginners," a collection of exuberant sexual adventures. Scatological and scandalous, The Pearl is definitely not for the straitlaced or pure of mind.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

My Secret Life by Anonymous
Nonsuch Publishing (September 28, 2007); ISBN-10: 1845883462

My Secret Life is perhaps the most infamous of all underground Victorian erotica. It is the sexual memoir of a well-to-do gentleman of Victorian England, who began, at an early age, to keep a diary of his erotic behaviour.

He continues this record for over forty years, creating, in the process, a unique social and psychological document. Its complete and detailed description of the hidden side of life in the nineteenth century furnishes materials for the understanding of the Victorian age that cannot be duplicated in any other source.
Available at: Amazon.com  / Amazon UK

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