Category Archives: erotica

Sex Ed Dept.: Today Flavorwire Offers Up “25 Great Works of Erotic Literature”

Flavorwire loves to make lists. Today we get their pick of “25 Great Works of Erotic Literature to Keep You Warm on Cold Winter Nights,” I guess because winter is here. Or maybe they just needed an excuse.

Check out the list below, but for plot summaries (what plot?) and excerpts, head to Flavorwire.

Here’s their excerpt from “Delta of Venus”:

“I would tell him how he almost made us lose interest in passion by his obsession with the gestures empty of their emotions, and how we reviled him, because he almost caused us to take vows of chastity, because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac — poetry.”

The list:

1 Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
2 Fanny Hill by John Cleland
3 The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
4 Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
5 Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
6 The Story of O, by “Pauline Réage”
7 “Beatrice Palmato” by Edith Wharton
8 Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
9 The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet
10 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
11 Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre
12 Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger
13 Belle de Jour by Joseph Kessel
14 Venus in Furs by Leopold van Sacher-Masoch
15 The Fermata by Nicholson Baker
16 The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
17 The Lover by Marguerite Duras
18 Nine and a Half Weeks by Ingeborg Day
19 The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell
20 Ulysses by James Joyce
21 The School of Venus by Anonymous
22 Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue by the Marquis de Sade
23 The Autobiography of a Flea by “Anonymous”
24 My Secret Life by “Walter”
25 Memoirs of a Young Rakehell by Gullaume Apollinaire