Marta Acosta forwarded me an interesting link: seems TimeOut London has just published their list of London’s 30 most erotic writers. Among them: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Freud, Boswell*, and Lady Caroline Lamb. Acosta noted in her email to me: only three women?!
So here’s my question – not to ask Who Are The Most Erotic Writers In All History Forever And Ever, I’m more after a different query. What writers blow your skirt up, literally? Who are the most erotic writers in your library?
*speaking of erotica: Every time I see Boswell’s name, I recall some reference to him that read, “like Boswell to his Johnson.” Once I learned that Boswell was Johnson’s biographer, and not pointedly attracted to his own personal johnson, that quote made a LOT more sense.
What, no John Donne?
And how, exactly, is Chaucer erotic? Seriously? Sample Chaucerian sex scene:
And sodeynly anon this Damyan
Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng.
While there’s something to be said for a direct approach, it’s not precisely EROTIC.
Emma Holly can write scenes featuring stuff I don’t normally get turned on, bondage, domination etc, and suddenly I get it.
Emma Holly!
Bridget Midway. Her Love My Way helped me finally understand, and even be turned on by BDSM. As a former sexual abuse investigator, this was no mean feat.
Some poetry does it for me e e cummings “I like your body when it’s with my body†http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-like-my-body-when-it-is-with-your/
and John Donne “To his Mistress Going to Bed†http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/elegy20.htm
The first erotic romance author I ever read was Susan Johnson so she has a special place in my heart along with her red leather dildos and jewel necklaces that double as sex toys.
Honestly with current romances Im enjoying the underlying D/s sexual tension in Madeline Hunter’s latest more that something labeled erotica that just seems to have superfluous sex games that don’t add anything to the relationship.
Right now, it’s all about some Louisa Burton in my house. Like Sandra D said about Emma Holly, she writes about sexual scenarios that are not necessarily my thing and makes me totally get it. Or maybe I just love the idea of naughty succubi and genies and satyrs. Seriously, go get her books!
HA! Security word: Function69. Hell, yeah.
Seriously! Freud?! I guess I’m just so squicked out about his complete turnaround regarding early traumatic experience in the role of hysteria that I just can’t picture Papa Freud as erotic.
Now Molly Weatherfied? Hot!
Robert Herrick.
THE VINE.
by Robert Herrick
I DREAM’D this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz’d to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way,
Enthrall’d my dainty Lucia.
Me thought, her long small legs & thighs
I with my Tendrils did surprize;
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waste
By my soft Nerv’lits were embrac’d:
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seem’d to me
Young Bacchus ravished by his tree.
My curles about her neck did craule,
And armes and hands they did enthrall:
So that she could not freely stir,
(All parts there made one prisoner.)
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts, which maids keep unespy’d,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took,
That with the fancie I awook;
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock then like a Vine.
*fans self*
Anais Nin! (damn laptop…no umlauts). She’s been a favorite of mine for some time.
I completely second Emma Holly. Didn’t know I’d like menages and m/m so much until Strange Attractions.
I also love Robin Schone. The Lady’s Tutor remains the most sensual book I’ve ever read.
Megan Hart is a new one for me. In reading Dirty, now reading Broken, she can suck me into the story so much I forget where I am.
Away12 really suits the day I’ve had. My brain is away…
Love the Herrick. Thank you Kiku (and thanks, spinsterwitch, for the nod to my evil twin Molly Weatherfield)
I am going to have to third (or fourth, or fifth… or somethingth, I’ve lost count) Emma Holly. Just reading the parts where no sex is happening in her novels is hot. She writes prose that is very tied to the senses and I just find that hot. ::Fans self just thinking about it now.::
And this comes at a very opportune time, as I am just re-reading “Strange Attractions” and being blown away by sex between two guys, and sex between two guys and a girl. Two guys and a girl (or as I call it in my fantasies, “The Me Sandwich” (Me Sandwiched between two hot guys)) is one of my biggest fantasies.
Spamword: Charge37. Yeah, I get quite a charge out of reading Emma Holly’s books.
No Anais Nin? The only reason I can figure they’d omit her is because they worried it would come off as to obligatory?? Though I am pleased to see Lady Caroline included. She stalked Lord Byron well before the days of the Intratubez and is an inspiration to groupies of hot clubfooted, silver-tongued poets.
I also really like Anna Clare, who wrote 3 books I’ve been able to find. My favorite is her historical with werewolves, FLOOD, from Black Lace. It isn’t like most of the werewolf stuff out there.
Great thread! I have to second ee cummings and Megan Hart and add…
Jacqueline Carey. Her work isn’t overtly erotica but oh holy goddess she turns me on. A lot.
I’m going to throw in a vote for Joey W. Hill. She can be hit or miss sometimes but when she hits it’s a home run. Natural Law and The Vampire Queen series ftw!
Kresley Cole writes incredibly hot romance novels. She has two series: the Immortals After Dark series (fantasy) and the MacCarrick Brothers Trilogy (Scottish Regency). I highly recommend both series. The stories themselves are gripping, and the sex scenes just blow me away!
I just finished the second in the Vampire Queen Series. Submissive men aren’t my thing but I found thier relationship really really interesting and found myself liking it more than I ever thought I would. But I really disliked some of sex outside thier relationship that just seemed to be there to up the erotic value and nothing else.
Spam: Town59 -Yep the were really going to town in that book.
Karen Marie Moning…great name for a romance writer, yes? She’s one of the few authors who I can read regarding “time travel”. Her stuff works for me…at least according to my husband who keeps buying me her books!
For me it’s Opal Carew. I really enjoyed her first release TWIN FANTASIES and can’t wait to read SWING.
1. Boswell got the clap NINETEEN times. And at least six of those times were after John Hunter published a paper concluding that the clap and syphilis where different phases of the same disease. Fraudulently, obviously, but he did some pretty serious research: he actually gave himself the clap and syphilis by poking pus from the pustules into his own penis.
2. I love Edna St. Vincent Millay for eroticism: “What my lips have kissed and where and I why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh upon the glass and listen for reply, and in my heart there stirs a quiet pain for unremembered lads that not again will turn to me at midnight with a cry… (Sonnnet XLIII)
3. Rilke, especially the end of the fifth elegy:
Angel: if there were a place we know nothing of, and there,
on some unsayable carpet, lovers revealed what here they could never master, their high daring
figures of heart’s flight,
their towers of desire, their ladders,
long since standing where there was no ground, leaning,trembling, on each other – and mastered them,
in front of the circle of watchers, the countless, soundless dead:
Would these not fling their last, ever-saved,ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternallyvalid coins of happiness in front of the finally truly smiling pair on the silent carpet?
Lora Leigh!
I think she’s romantica not erotica, but I love me some Shiloh Walker. And I don’t do erotica so much.
Emma Holly, Angela Knight and Lora Leigh.
Hm. Depends on my mood. Emma Holly certainly writes some spicy spicy goodness. For m/m I do like JL Langely. Samantha Kane.
And the crack is alway so good: JR Ward.
As others have said, definitely Emma Holly. I just got a new one by Kate Pearce called Simply Sexual that is currently rocking my socks as well.
And Sarah McCarty!
Emma Holly absolutely. I also love the Sylvia Day historicals. No tricks, no surprise guests, just really hot writing.
And Larissa Ione’s short stories.
Whew!
heh. Shot36. I’m not even touching that 🙂
Poetry: I agree on e.e. cummings, definitely. “it is so quite new a thing”!
Jacqueline Carey gets me, regardless of the genre boundary thing. The Kushiel books are hawt! And I love the romantic sex scenes in the Outlander series.
I haven’t read a lot of really explicit erotica, but I have enjoyed some Shiloh Walker recently.
This thread has certainly given me some ideas about what to read next!
I definitely second Karen Marie Moning! I never thought I’d be interested in time-travel, but she is such a great writer that I was pulled in completely from the beginning.
There’s only one author who makes my girly parts tingle. What I like is that when I’m not in a mood for tingling, she still reaches the parts other authors can’t:
P L Nunn
You may be scarred for life but you’ll be thankful for it 🙂
Shakespeare. Pfffft. Erotic author my bottom.
I’ll second Carey, and add Charlaine Harris, particularly all scenes that feature Eric.
W. H. Auden:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
I second Lisabea’s JL Langley vote. “My Fair Captain” was my first e-book, because I could not resist the regency+space+gay sex premise. I was a bit worried that it would be the “hilariously bad” type of “worth it”, but it ended up being the “so OMG amazing” type of “worth it”. I’m glad I have it in e-copy, because I’d’ve worn out a hard copy by now.
I’ll likely be scoffed at for this, but I still have a soft spot for D. H. Lawrence. Ah, Mellors…
You people are missing a major point—the list is of authors who LIVED IN LONDON.
And where, pray tell, is Samuel Pepys?
Incidentally, Boswell’s LIFE OF JOHNSON is not exactly sexy—they are actually thinking of his journals.
Oh, and Tam—the seduction in Chaucer’s TROILUS AND CRISEYDE is sexy, IIRC.
Ann—Shakespeare is so erotic! Try the poems, especially “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece.”
Hey, props for putting Kureishi on there. He usually freaks me out, but he also wrote the script for My Beautiful Laundrette and that has one of the steamiest sex scenes I’ve ever seen. (He wrote it, not directed it. But he still should get some credit!)
Seconding votes for Millay and Donne. I must confess, if Andrew Marvell had sent me “To His Coy Mistress”, it might have worked. Keats I find incredibly romantic, but not especially erotic. (But I haven’t yet read many of his letters. So that may change.)
Sarah Waters and Emma Donoghue are both incredibly erotic at times. And parts of Brideshead Revisited, even though there’s nothing actually said or done (dammit!) get me a little worked up. In a good way. I’ve never liked any of Emma Holly’s books enough to hold on to them, but the erotic elements are really good all the same.