Read Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey Online
Authors: Lori Perkins
Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (34 page)
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HERE ARE A WHOLE LOT OF BOOKS mentioned in these pages—some are smutty, some are literary, some are educational. We’ve distilled them into a big reference list for you, so you can put them on your favorite reading device and become an expert on smut.
We left out the mainstream classics—we figured you could find
Gone with the Wind
and
Pride and Prejudice
on your own (and if you haven’t, you should!).
We also divided the list into fiction and nonfiction. The fiction list is almost a best-of guide to the erotica of the past decade, plus a few BDSM standards.
Erotica expert Susie Bright put her own list together on Amazon’s Listmania (where you can find many of the same titles) in which she summed up what it is about these books that makes them so compelling:
Every once in a blue hot moon, a novel comes along that captures women’s erotic fantasies. The female heroine is
plucky, headstrong, a little naïve—but with a sexual appetite that’s never been tapped. When she finds a lover who is confident (alright, masterful!) and persuasive enough to push her over the edge—wow, just send all your messages to voicemail and lock the door, because readers will not be torn from these pages.
We hope you’ll find something here whose pages you won’t be torn from, either.
Bared to You: A Crossfire Novel
, by Sylvia Day
Best Gay Erotica 2009
, edited by Richard Labonte and James Lear
Black Feathers: Erotic Dreams
, by Cecilia Tan
Blind Seduction
, by Debra Hyde
Blue Boy
, by Rakesh Satyal
Candy
, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg
Carrie’s Story
, by Molly Weatherfield
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, by Lord Byron
Edge Plays
, by Cecilia Tan
Exit to Eden
, by Anne Rampling (Anne Rice)
Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
, by John Cleland
The Flame and the Flower
, by Kathleen Woodiwiss
Forever
…, by Judy Blume
Gabriel’s Inferno
, by Sylvain Renard
Gabriel’s Rapture
, by Sylvain Renard
The Image
, by Jean de Berg
Jonah Sweet of Delancey Street
, by Ryan Field
Juliette; or, Vice Amply Rewarded
, by Marquis de Sade
Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue
, by Marquis de Sade
Lip Service
, by M.J. Rose
Lolita
, by Vladimir Nabokov
Madame Bovary
, by Gustave Flaubert
Magic University series, by Cecilia Tan
The Marketplace series, by Laura Antoniou
Mind Games
, by Cecilia Tan
Mr. Benson
, by John Preston
Natural Law
, by Joey W. Hill
Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair
, by Elizabeth McNeill
No Adam in Eden
, by Grace Metalious
Peyton Place
, by Grace Metalious
The Prince’s Boy
, by Cecilia Tan
Return to Peyton Place
, by Grace Metalious
Roving Pack
, by Sassafras Lowrey
Secrets anthology series, by Red Sage Publishing
Seducing the Myth
, edited by Lucy Felthouse
The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, by A. N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Smut by the Sea
, edited by Lucy Felthouse
Smut in the City
, edited by Lucy Felthouse
Story of L
, by Debra Hyde
Story of O
, by Pauline Réage
Sweet Savage Love
, by Rosemary Rogers
Switch
, by Megan Hart
Taking a Shot
, by Jaci Burton
Tarnsman of Gor
, by John Norman
The Top of Her Game
, by Emma Holly
The Vagina Monologues
, by Eve Ensler
Velvet Glove
, by Emma Holly
Venus in Furs
, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
The Whippingham Papers
, by Algernon Charles Swinburne
White Flames: Erotic Dreams
, by Cecilia Tan
The Wolf and the Dove
, by Kathleen Woodiwiss
50 Ways to Play: BDSM for Nice People
, by Don Macleod and Debra Macleod
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth
, by Camille Bacon-Smith
Fifty Shades of Pleasure: A Bedside Companion: Sex Secrets That Hurt So Good
, by Marisa Bennett
Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious
, by Emily Toth
The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers
, by Elizabeth Benedict
Letters to Penthouse
, by Editors of
Penthouse
Master: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Master R
, by Master R
My Secret Garden
, by Nancy Friday
Natural History of the Romance Novel
, by Pamela Regis
New Perspectives on Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays
, edited by Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger
The Passion of Michel Foucault
, by James Miller
Pleasure: A Woman’s Guide to Getting the Sex You Want, Need and Deserve
, by Hilda Hutcherson
Psychopathia Sexualis
, by Richard Krafft-Ebing
The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge
, edited by Tristan Taormino
Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
, by Lisa Cron
Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750-2000
, edited by Sarah S. G. Frantz and Katharina Rennhak
LORI PERKINS
is the publisher of Riverdale Avenue Books, a digital-first e-publisher. She was the cofounder and former editorial director of erotica e-publisher Ravenous Romance and has been a literary agent for 20 years. She is the author of
The Insider’s Guide to Getting an Agent
(Writer’s Digest Books) and has edited twenty erotica anthologies and more than one hundred erotic novels, as well as published erotica under a pseudonym.
1
Yes, I did read the Twilight books, too, and no, I’m not a closeted romance fan. I suppose I’d gotten used to the movies’’characterization of Bella and had forgotten just how wimpy and annoyingly naïve she was in the books. I reread the last book recently and realized I greatly preferred the screenwriter’s version of Bella. But I digress: Ana is just as annoyingly naïve as Bella was, except it’s worse, because she’s graduating from college with a high school girl’s experience and sensibilities—a very immature high school girl’s experience and sensibilities.
2
As you may imagine, Ana was not the character with whom I, personally, identified.
3
For a lot of erotic romance folks, you need an alpha male to sweep the main character off her feet. A submissive man who craves the application of a woman’s itchy palm applied to his needy backside, among other acts, is not as romantic as the reverse, it would seem.
4
A lot of romance purists don’t think there should be
any
sex in romance, much less the amount ladled into the Fifty Shades books.
5
“He’s Just Not That Into Anyone” and “They Know What Boys Want.”
6
“Women Falling for Fifty Shades of Degradation,” Gina Barreca, the
Hartford Courant
, May 3, 2012.
7
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/fifty-shades-of-
grey-giving-bondage-a-bad-name-20120709-21rm3.html
.
8
http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2012/07/10/f-50-shades-of-grey-bdsm.html
.
9
http://www.purefreedom.org/blog/?p=320
.
10
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/ny_gals_learning_
the_ropes_at_fifty_sVWWKeksj9WKUto2ITg1KK
.
11
http://www.wiredforstory.com/fifty-shades-of-story-vs-%e2%
80%9cwellwritten%e2%80%9d/
.