Desire Read online

  DESIRE

  100 of Literature’s Sexiest Stories

  chosen by

  Mariella Frostrup

  and the Erotic Review

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Desire

  Strict mistresses, naughty maids, handsome gardeners and disarming strangers; literature is awash with love, sex and desire. This collection brings together 100 of the best examples, hand-picked by Mariella Frostrup and the Erotic Review.

  From romance and seduction to downright dirty deeds, here are prize-winners, bestsellers and rising stars, each of whom prove that when it comes to the bedroom, a little fiction goes a long way.

  So whether you’re looking for love, lust or something in between, this gorgeous anthology is the perfect gift... or bedside companion.

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About Desire

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Awakening Desire

  Anonymous

  from Eveline

  Rudyard Kipling

  First Dawn

  Kate Chopin

  A Respectable Woman

  Anonymous

  from A Night in a Moorish Harem

  Bram Stoker

  from Dracula

  D. H. Lawrence

  from Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  John Fowles

  from The Magus

  Angela Carter

  The Bloody Chamber

  Angela Carter

  The Company of Wolves

  Patricia Highsmith

  from Carol

  Alice Munro

  Bardon Bus

  Luke Jennings

  Serena

  Henri Breton

  The Disappearing Island

  Justine Dubois

  San Sebastian

  Justine Dubois

  Torn Lace

  Rebecca Chance

  Gluttony

  Roger Moineau

  Coming Swimmingly

  Alessandra Rivalta

  The Perfect Italian Wife

  Harriet Warner

  A Bed for the Night

  Diana Gabaldon

  Revelations of the Bridal Chamber

  John Gibb

  Blind Love

  John Gibb

  Green

  Francis Dean

  The Elegant Duchess

  Adnan Mahmutović

  Fatima

  Paullina Simons

  from The Bronze Horseman

  Edward Field

  Forbidden Arias

  Primula Bond

  from The Silver Chain

  Emma Donoghue

  The Tale of the Rose

  Jodi Ellen Malpas

  from This Man

  Ali May

  When it Gets Hot in Tehran

  John Gibb

  Four in Hand

  Nina Gibb

  On the Beach

  Ruby McNally

  The Midwesterners

  Anna Maconochie

  What Have I to Do With You?

  Veronica Cancio De Grandy

  Pears and Silk

  Laurence Klavan

  The Witness

  Burning Desire

  John Cleland

  from Fanny Hill

  Kate Percival

  from The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival, the Belle of the Delaware

  James Joyce

  from Ulysses

  Henry Miller

  from Quiet Days in Clichy

  Roald Dahl

  The Great Switcheroo

  Anne Rice

  from The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

  Roberta Latow

  from Three Rivers

  Alan Hollinghurst

  from The Swimming-Pool Library

  Anaïs Nin

  A Model

  Luke Jennings

  Small Talk

  Elizabeth Speller

  Thought Waves

  Louise Welsh

  The Worm on the Bud

  Louise Black

  Grammar Lessons

  Justine Dubois

  Dorchester Evening

  Nikki Gemmell

  from The Bride Stripped Bare

  Helen Cross

  Pull

  Andrew Crumey

  Vox Vulva

  Michel Faber

  Bed & Breakfast

  Nikki Gemmell

  Nevertire

  Louise Welsh

  Belle and Sylvie

  Katie Kelly

  Summer

  Alex Chambers

  The Selfish Giantess

  Garry Stewart

  Off the Road

  Nnenna Marcia

  House Keeping

  Nnenna Marcia

  Mrs Salad Woman

  Malachi O’Doherty

  Love Me, Love My Wife

  LaShonda Katrice Burnett

  The Art of Losing

  Kass Goldsworthy

  Commute

  Kass Goldsworthy

  This Is What It’s Like

  Charlotte Stein

  from Intrusion

  Neville Elder

  The Red House

  Arlene Heyman

  The Loves of Her Life

  Darkest Desire

  Marquis de Sade

  from Justine

  Guillaume Apollinaire

  from Memoirs of a Young Rakehill

  Georges Bataille

  The Antique Wardrobe

  Pauline Réage

  from Story of O

  Sebastion Gray

  from The Slit

  Alina Reyes

  from Behind Closed Doors

  Michel Houellebecq

  from Atomised

  Henri Breton

  The Devil’s Whisper

  Michel Faber

  The Perfect W

  Lucy Golden

  Hannah’s Tale – Flat

  Geoff Nicholson

  Glove Story

  Christine Pountney

  Mean Streak

  Christine Pountney

  The Cat that Got the Cream

  David Henry Sterry

  The Snow Leopard

  Mitzi Szereto

  Moonburn

  Harriet Warner

  Burning Desire

  Anne Billson

  Dead Girls

  Angelica Jacob

  This Year at Marienbad

  Geoff Nicholson

  California Streamin’

  D. B. C. Pierre

  Lust

  Helen Walsh

  Men and Motors

  Helen Walsh

  You’ve Been Framed

  Lucy Golden

  Finny’s Tale – The Creature in the Garden

  Katie Kelly

  Let’s Put This to Bed

  A. F. Harrold

  The Boys

  Nicholson Baker

  Shandee Finds Dave’s Arm

  Fulani

  The Phenomenology of the Whip (Porn Mix)

  Danielle Schloss

  Park Antics

  Ortensia Visconti

  Tokyo

  Tiffany Reisz

  from The Saint

  Jo Mazelis

  Rose Madder and the Silken Robe

  Christopher Peachment

  The Man Also Rises

  About the Artwork

  About Mariella Frostrup

  Also Available from Head of Zeus

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Extended Copyright

  Foreword

  In a world saturated with se
xual imagery a new anthology of erotic stories might appear superfluous. With real sex in every manifestation available at the click of a mouse on the World Wide Web, who would bother reading (itself considered a prehistoric activity in some quarters) fictional descriptions of other people’s sexual adventures? Perhaps I’m just one of a tiny minority; for me it’s rather like asking if you have real sex, why you’d bother wasting your thoughts on sexual fantasies?

  My first introduction to the erotic world was the proverbial fumble behind the bike shed, but that furtive initiation arrived in tandem with stories I’d unearthed among my parents seemingly dreary tomes at home – illicit material beyond my wildest imaginings. Back in the 1970’s, long before you could log on and find every variety of sexual act performed by the poor and downtrodden, the desperate and the dispossessed, sex was available predominately on the page.

  The obscenity trial for Lady Chatterley had taken place just two years before I was born, and so, only fifteen years later, I turned to D. H. Lawrence and his hirsute, brooding heroes with their overwhelming desires to try and unlock the secrets of the sensual universe. It was in my father’s smoke-filled study that I happened upon The Virgin and the Gypsy as a precocious thirteen year old, and devoured descriptions of the flighty Yvette’s passion for the eponymous gypsy, loping past on ‘flexible hips’. I knew exactly what he was getting at when he described ‘the curious dark, suave purity of all his body, outlined in the green jersey: a purity like a living sneer’. I’d already met a boy just like that. Every single Lawrencium syllable suggested a sexual tryst of a dangerous, convention-defying variety.

  Next came Anaïs Nin, purloined from my mother’s bedside table, whose Delta of Venus transported me to a world long passed and physical sensations I was only just discovering. I luxuriated in her conjured world of sex, oblivion and depravity, and still occasionally enjoy an imaginative flight to the same territory. A pioneer of early female erotic writing (of which there is still nowhere near enough), Nin’s racy Parisian literary life, passionate affair with Henry Miller and need to make a buck or two, led to her penning prolific amounts of page-turning, pitch-perfect, purple prose. Her sensual world, suffused with the heady scent of 1920’s opium dens, delved into very dark territory, including incest and paedophilia – topics wholly unpalatable in today’s more enlightened society, but her prose remains sublime. Where Lawrence alluded to sex and class, power and subjugation, Nin described, in great physical detail, how all those elements were brought into play in our expressions of sexuality.

  These two writers formed my early sexual education, revealing the power of the mind to transport you to places, situations and stimulations that you might avoid in real life, but can safely embrace cerebrally. As human beings, our ability to imagine things we refrain from doing is more impressive than our capacity for doing things we can’t imagine. The state of human arousal is far more closely connected to a world we conjure than the one in which we spend our daily lives. The best sex, even while you’re physically engaged in doing it, involves an ability to rise above the mechanics. Or is this just a woman’s point of view?

  Our engagement with, and attitude to, physical passion can seem the one area where men and women really do come from different planets. The products of the contemporary, male-dominated porn industry, with its relentless pounding and abusing of female bodies via every orifice and in positions even the Kamasutra failed to dream up, suggests so. This century’s visual pornography, featuring sex as gymnastics with extra lashings of masochism, sadism, or both, seems to have evolved little from the last century, apart from in its abundance. Pornography may do the trick, but through a criminal lack of imagination it renders sex as just another physical activity, like jogging with benefits.

  Over the course of my lifetime, the place of sex in our lives has changed immeasurably; once obscured behind closed doors and quivering net curtains, it has become a ubiquitous driving force of the commercial world. Sex sells, and its omnipresence in everything from perfume adverts to pop songs feels close to saturation. Yet is the world a sexier place? Are more of us having sex? Or are we so busy on our smartphones, working twenty-hour days and keeping up with social media, that sex has slipped to the bottom of our to do lists – and even then it is, increasingly, relegated to an online spectator sport.

  If conversations with friends and the wider correspondence I receive for my Observer ‘Dear Mariella’ column can be counted as evidence, the prolificacy of pornography is actually becoming a turn off for the over-exposed. Once, as teenagers ourselves, the scent of sex, the possibility of passion, the longing for love, suffused every moment of our waking lives. Now, we watch our children step gingerly into that seductive, all-consuming period of their lives, and the sex they’ll encounter if, like the majority of their generation they seek illumination online, will be graphic, often violent and leave little to the imagination. That for me is the tragedy of their introduction into the world of Eros. Rather than rummaging through their parents’ books to find mention of any-thing even vaguely reflecting the fires they start to feel burning, they’re given a full frontal view from day one.

  Not that literature necessarily provides a softer way in – the stories collected here can’t be regarded as tame, or a young person’s guide. This collection is strictly for adults only, though I confess to employing a degree of censorship. With sexual violence so predominant in our news bulletins, I was eager to keep this an abuse- and crime-free zone, despite my belief that dark fantasies can be an outlet for hidden demons, not a trigger for creating real-life monsters. We all have fantasies we’d be ashamed to admit and are reluctant to entertain, but also the capacity for restraint and self-analysis. Hopefully, the stories you’ll encounter in this anthology will be shocking, but also entertaining, immersive, seductive and downright dirty.

  These are tall tales penned by writers skilled in the art of evoking sexual desire in all its visceral and varied glory. Personally, I’m not particularly interested in watching other people have sex, but I’ve always enjoyed imagining it. We sit on trains and imagine sex with strangers, catch someone’s eye across a room and feel a frisson that sets our imaginative juices flowing. We imagine actors in movies, liberated from the confines of the story entering an adventure of our own creation and lie in bed during the bleak mid-winter thinking about sun-kissed sex on tropical beaches. The minute we stop imagining sex, our ability to enjoy it is, surely, also diminished.

  Increasingly, behavioural links are being drawn between teenagers and adults at midlife and, for me, one of the most compelling examples of this connection is when it comes to sex. For decades we are busy doing it and nursing the products of our procreative impulses, and then, as in adolescence, sex either becomes a rarity or returns to occupy the imagination as it did during our prepubescent days.

  In my lifetime the world has grown into an endlessly literal place; everything is available, exposure is graphic and nothing is left to our imaginations. That’s where erotica has an important role to play. Stories with a beginning, a middle and a climax have existed since human beings first learnt to express themselves in words. This diverse collection of such stories, old and new, runs the gamut from romantic to bizarre, the amusingly old-fashioned to the futuristic. In these stories, a woman is ravaged at a fancy dress party by two guests in gorilla suits; a married couple perform for onlookers by a Scottish loch; a frustrated housewife seduces her driver on a scorching road trip through the Australian desert; a tennis lesson descends into chaotic coupling. Servants will be ravished in anonymous tales from the 19th century; lesbians will be reluctantly unfaithful; men will suffer the agonies of their enormous erections. We will be exposed to frotting on an Iranian bus, an African maid stepping in for her mistress and a wealthy west London couple getting more than they bargained for when they fork out for a garden statue.

  *

  In the course of editing this anthology I’ve become adept at reading graphic sex in the company of total strangers and leav
ing them none the wiser. It’s quite a challenge to keep your expression neutral, commuting on Great Western Railways, reading about an eight inch ‘succubus’ pleasuring his powerdressing corporate mistress. Contained here are laughs and shocks, filthy talk and funny scenarios and, hopefully, like the promise of a multiplex pick ‘n’ mix, something for everyone.

  Selecting these stories reminded me of the all-consuming passion of my teenage years, returned me to a heady erotic world I’d become somewhat estranged from and reawakened my interest in this intimate and ancient form of literary pleasure. I hope those of you reading will be similarly seduced.

  Mariella Frostrup

  October 2016

  Introduction

  It has been said that ‘one man’s erotica is another’s pornography’. Really? Today, post-Fifty Shades of Grey and YouPorn.com, this can no longer hold true: whether we hate it or love it, whether we are inured to it or not, pornography has lost pretty much all of its power to shock. Now, for many readers, Julie Burchill’s long-standing contempt for ‘erotica’ has been vindicated: the word has finally acquired a genteel, middle-class patina. Moreover, had we paid any heed to this old saw whilst selecting stories for Desire: 100 of Literature’s Sexiest Stories, it would have introduced some unwelcome inhibitions. So, significantly, the word ‘erotic’ is absent from the title. Instead, we’ve used the word ‘sexy’. Though perhaps a little pedestrian, I still find this a more honest and inclusive adjective, and I’m content to leave the debate of what is erotic and what is pornographic to the people who so love to take issue with those words.