These literary masterpieces are actually just hardcore porn

Porn is dirty, at least it has a somewhat vulgar edge. But these novels are art and will still give you red ears.

I’m probably talking about you. Intelligent, well-read, someone who does her shopping at the organic butcher and knows what autofiction means and who wrinkles her nose at the word ‘porn’. Because too coarse and too masculine, too little imagination, too much close-up and too straightforward. And yet. Yet there is sometimes that longing for something that goes beyond a kiss on the neck on page 247 of an average literary novel.

Good news: world literature serves you. For decades, actually. Because while academics debate whether Flaubert invented the modernist novel, we now know: that guy could also just write and provocatively too. And he was certainly not the only one.

So especially for you, for me, and all the women who really enjoy a dose of eroticism but in a civilized way: the masterpieces that you can casually leave lying on your coffee table, but for which you are secretly very glad you were home alone while reading.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence (1928)

This book was banned in England for decades. Banned. That says enough. Lawrence describes the affair between the aristocratic Connie and her gamekeeper Mellors with a word choice that made the British judge blush at the time and still, let’s not beat around the bush, is quite effective. Lawrence firmly believed in sex as liberation, as the only real contact between two people in an industrialized world full of alienation. That sounds like a thesis, but it reads like something very different. You won’t forget the flower cards quickly and I won’t say more.

Delta of Venus – Anais Nin (1977, written in the 1940s)

Anais Nin originally wrote these short stories at the request of an anonymous collector who paid her a dollar per page and asked her: more sex, less poetry. Nin refused to scrap the poetry, but the result is a collection that is both literarily refined and downright explicit; a combination you don’t come across very often. Nin writes about desire from a female perspective, with a sensuality that still feels fresh today. This is the book you give to a friend with the note: ‘just read it.’ She’ll get it then.

Story of O – Pauline Reage (1954)

Published under a pseudonym, because the real author – the French writer Anne Desclos – would lose her job if it came out. Story of O won the prestigious Prix des Deux Magots. And it is also just hard-core BDSM literature. Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism, and Masochism, okay. The story of a woman who completely surrenders to her lover has been the subject of feminist discussion for seventy years: is this liberation or submission? Emancipation or fantasy? The answer might be: both. If it’s your thing, I’d say: read it.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera (1984)

One of my personal favorites, just like the movie by the way. Oh, that scene with Lena Olin and the hat… This book is on every selected reading list of every civilized university in the world. It is also full of sex. Kundera describes the erotic escapades of the Prague surgeon Tomas with a philosophical detachment that makes it all even spicier – as if you’re watching and at the same time thinking about existence. The scenes between Tomas and the frivolous Sabina, with her bowler hat and her mirror games, are now historical. This is the book with which you impress on a Tinder date and yourself. The proverbial win-win, then.

Lust – Elfriede Jelinek (1989)

Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature. That looks nice on the back cover. What’s not mentioned: this book is a ruthless, almost pornographic description of sex and power in an Austrian marriage; deliberately raw, intentionally unromantic, and yet impossible to put down. Jelinek writes like a surgeon cutting with a scalpel of language. Not for the faint of heart, but for those who want literature that really does something. And if someone has won a Nobel Prize with it, you don’t have to be ashamed of it. Not even if you’re reading it on the plane.

Fanny Hill – John Cleland (1748)

The oldest book on this list is still impressively relevant. Cleland wrote this in prison and created the memoirs of a young woman who describes the 18th-century London sex life from the inside. Not as a victim, but as an agent of her own story. Fanny Hill is funny, detailed, and also historically interesting. Moreover, it is explicit in a way you wouldn’t expect from something written so long ago. The world we live in may change faster than light, our earthly needs remain pretty much the same, it turns out.

Salt on My Skin – Benoite Groult

She an intellectual Parisienne, he a Breton fisherman with a completely different lifestyle. Both are married, but not to each other. Their meeting leads to a lifelong passionate affair. You’d almost want to take a lover for it. Also a perfect book for vacation.

So you no longer have to pay for doctor novels with a embarrassed “I’m buying it for a friend” at the bookstore. These books elevate you to a higher level on every level.

PS Inspired by The Unbearable Lightness of Being? We wrote an article here about the best mirror sex. For when you want to keep going.