101 Best Sex Scenes Ever Written

Barnaby Conrad

Description

Making the provocative purposeful, this analysis spotlights the most exciting--or potentially embarrassing--story element: the obligatory sex scene. This sensibly suggestive guide demonstrates how to advance plots and reveal truths about characters through their romantic tableaus. Each scene is accompanied by insight into its authors' intentions, how they accomplished them, and their thoughts on romance, love, and sex. The featured passages include men such as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck and women from Margaret Mitchell to Toni Morrison and Danielle Steel.

Sujets

• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité
• Sex

Informations

• Publié par: Linden Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 7
• EAN13: 9781610350563
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Other books by Barnaby Conrad
“101 Best” Series for Writers
101 Best Scenes Ever Written 101 Best Beginnings Ever Written
Other Nonfiction La Fiesta Brava Gates of Fear Death of Manolete San Francisco: A Profile in Words and Pictures Famous Last Words Tahiti Encyclopedia of Bullfighting How to Fight a Bull Fun While It Lasted A Revolting Transaction Time Is All We Have Hemingway’s Spain The Complete Guide to Writing Fiction Name Dropping Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life (with Monte Schulz) The World of Herb Caen Learning to Write Fiction from the Masters Santa Barbara
Fiction The Innocent Villa Matador Dangerfield Zorro: A Fox in the City Endangered (with Niels Mortensen) Fire Below Zero (with Nico Mastorakis) Keepers of the Secret (with Nico Mastorakis) Last Boat to Cadiz The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth
Translations The Wounds of Hunger (Spota) The Second Life of Captain Contreras (Luca de Tena) My Life as a Matador (Autobiography of Carlos Arruza)

101 Best Sex Scenes Ever Written Copyright © 2011 by Barnaby Conrad. All rights reserved.
Published by Quill Driver Books an imprint of Linden Publishing 2006 South Mary, Fresno, California 93721 559-233-6633 / 800-345-4447 QuillDriverBooks.com
Quill Driver Books and Colophon are trademarks of Linden Publishing, Inc.
ISBN 978-1-610350-01-3
135798642
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conrad, Barnaby, 1922-
101 best sex scenes ever written : an erotic romp through literature for writers and readers / Barnaby Conrad.
     p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61035-001-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Erotic stories–Authorship. 2. Erotic stories–Technique. 3. Sex in literature. I. Title. II. Title: One hundred one best sex scenes ever written. III. Title: One hundred and one best sex scenes ever written. IV. Title: Best sex scenes ever written. V. Title: Erotic romp through literature for writers and readers.
PN3377.5.E76C66 2011
809.3'93543–dc22
2011008201
“The dirtiest book of all is an expurgated book.” Walt Whitman
Among the authors whose writing is quoted in this book are the following:
Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, James M. Cain, Michael Chabon, Peter De Vries, Nelson DeMille, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert, Ken Follett, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Elmore Leonard, Sinclar Lewis, John D. MacDonald, Peter Mathiessen, Somerset Maugham, Henry Miller, Margaret Mitchell, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Anäis Nin, John O’Hara, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert B. Parker, Nora Roberts, Philip Roth, Jane Smiley, Betty Smith, Susan Sontag, Danielle Steele, John Steinbeck, William Styron, Paul Theroux,
John Updike, Joan Wickersham,
and many more.
“Literature is all—or mostly—about sex.” Anthony Burgess
Contents
I NTRODUCTION
C HAPTER 1       The Best
C HAPTER 2       Off Camera
C HAPTER 3       Tame But Good
C HAPTER 4       “What Is This Thing Called, Love?”
C HAPTER 5       A Watershed in Sexual Literature
C HAPTER 6       Lolita
C HAPTER 7       “Hah-Hah, Was It Funny for You, Too?”
C HAPTER 8       Brief Encounters
C HAPTER 9       In Flagrante Delicto
C HAPTER 10       Oral Exam
C HAPTER 11       “What Goes Up … ”
C HAPTER 12       Somewhat Bizarre
C HAPTER 13       Ugh, E-e-e-uuu, and Gross
C ONCLUSION
I NDEX
Introduction
“Sex is God’s joke on human beings.” Bette Davis
S INCE SEX IS MANKIND’S OLDEST—AND MOST IMPORTANT—PASTIME, it is not strange that so much has been written about it since writing began.
What is remarkable is that, in light of the fact that there are a very limited number of orifices and appendages associated with the human body, there seems to be no limit to what amalgamations and problems and comeuppances the creative mind can conceive of when dealing with and writing about most this ancient and most basic activity.
W. H. Auden maintained that no two people ever read the same book. Perhaps we can expand Auden’s thought by saying that no two people ever got the same reaction from the same sex scene.
Not so long ago, the author and publisher of this book would have been jailed for propagating pornography. In 1944, for example, Lillian Smith’s acclaimed novel, Strange Fruit, was banned in Massachusetts because of the author’s onetime use of a four-letter word in a pivotal scene, a word known and dear to most school kids in the country.
Hard to believe now, but when Lucille Ball wanted to tell her TV fans that she was going to have a baby, she wasn’t allowed to say the word “pregnant” on the air but was obliged to use the Spanish word, encinta.
As author Bill Bryson wrote in his book Made in America about the Strange Fruit case:

The publishers took the state to court, but the case fell apart when the defense attorney arguing for its sale was unable to bring himself to utter the objectionable word in court, in effect conceding that it was too filthy for public consumption. “In 1948, Norman Mailer caused a sensation by including pissed off in The Naked and the Dead. Three years later, America got its first novel to use four-letter words extensively when James Jones’s From Here to Eternity was published. Even there the editors were at sixes and sevens over which words to allow. They allowed fuck and shit (though not without excising about half of such appearances from the original manuscript) but drew the line at cunt and prick.”
Against such a background, dictionary makers became seized with uncertainty. In the 1960s, the Merriam Webster Third New International Dictionary broke new ground by including a number of taboo words— cunt, shit, and prick —but lost its nerve when it came to fuck. Mario Pei protested the omission in the New York Times, but of course without being able to specify what the word was. To this day, America remains to an extraordinary degree a land of euphemism. Even now the U.S. State Department cannot bring itself to use the word prostitute. Instead it refers to “available casual indigenous female companions.”
Many American newspapers had never used the word penis until Mrs. Lorena Bobbitt bobbed her husband’s in his sleep, and the press was forced to call, well, a spade a spade. (What a wonderful scene it would make in a novel or film when the first persons spotted the dismembered member after it was tossed out of the car by Lorena: “Listen, Lucinda, I know I’ve had a couple of drinks but would you mind lookin’ over here—yeah, there in the grass there—is that what I think it is?” And Lucinda says, “Oh God—poor Johnny Bobbitt!”)
What exactly is obscenity’s definition? Not until 1957 did the Supreme Court get around to considering the matter of obscenity, and then it was unable to make any more penetrating judgment than that it was material that appealed to “prurient interests” and inflamed “lustful thoughts.” In effect, it ruled that obscenity could be recognized but not defined—or as Justice Potter Stewart famously put it: “I know it when I see it.”
Justice Stewart surely would label this book pure porn, and of course, considered out of context, many of the scenes read as though they were, indeed, porn. Yet every excerpt is from a distinguished writer, often a great one, and its source is a published and respected novel or short story. You will read scenes from the writings of five Nobel Prize winners and many Pulitzer Prize authors. What surprised me was how surprised people have been when I tell them that some of the most graphic “encounters” in the book came from books they wouldn’t have expected, eliciting, for example: “Why, I didn’t even remember that multi-paged sex scene in Sophie’s Choice!”
The selections were not chosen gratuitously, not included to titillate—(sorry)—the reader. They all advanced the plot in some way or helped to characterize the protagonists of the story they came from.
“Action is character,” Scott Fitzgerald said, and certainly sex is action, no matter how it is modified: shyly, reluctantly, occasionally, frantically, often, seldom, vigorously, mechanically, lovingly, desperately, routinely, expertly, clumsily, ad adverbium infinitum.
All those adverbs, the different ways to describe “it,” are one of the reasons we are attracted to what the late William F. Buckley, Jr. called “the OSS,” the obligatory sex scene.
In 1525, one Pietro Aretino published “16 Modi, or Ways of Copulation,” with sonnets to match.
This book is not intended to be a handbook for those ways, or the definitive book on the writings of sex throughout the ages; I shall leave such works as The Kama Sutra, Catullus, the tales of Rabelais and Balzac, Fanny Hill, Zola’s Nana, The Story Of O, Moll Flanders, Maggie, A Girl Of The Streets, Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy, etcetera, for the sc