The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton
Poetry is the medium via which Clifton confers this reckoning with the at once brutal and inspiring legacy of North American, African descendant slaves. Praised for her subversive use of biblical and mythological character tropes, she dissects the various ways the chattel system allowed for its chief commodity (people) to be seen.
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And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems by Maya Angelou
Widely considered for a cross section of Americans spanning multiple generations the "People's Poet Laureate", Angelou's "And Still I Rise" declare's a brazen resilience, located not only within herself, but within any and all women bold enough to summon it.
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All About Love: New Visions by Bell Hooks
Hooks explodes trite notions of formulaic "love" crafting in their former places a beneficially strenuous work of engagement. She asserts that this active brand of "love" stands to realize that for which so many indefinitely search.
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The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
De Beauvoir's seminal identification of the manners in which patriarchy diminutives the role of women in romantic dynamics, culture, and society at large maintains strikingly disturbing relevance in today's #Timesup ideologically shifting moment.
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Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
Authored entirely while Genet was imprisoned, this largely autobiographical account details the then-illicit encounters of Paris' homosexual underground. A breathtaking snapshot of love and life within the margins.
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The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories: 75th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Angela Carter
Carter's gothic yarns—often riffing on classic fairytales—realize richly supernatural worlds, protagonists, and scenarios, paving the way for storytellers like Audrey Niffenegger, William Goldman, and JK Rowling.
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Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Baldwin cements his literary influence via this tale of clandestine romance amid a Paris in the thrusts of creative and cultural upheaval. As a result of phrasings textured to engaged the reader's full range of senses, the story's painted pictures realize characters almost realer than life itself.
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Story of the Eye (1st City Lights Edition) By Georges Bataille
A sexuality explorative of the "sinister side" is cataloged in Bataille's seminal work of literature. The lines between mortality and sensuality are both disturbingly and stimulatingly blurred.
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Sporting Guide: Los Angeles, 1897 by Liz Goldwyn
Lifetimes before matching a "right swipe" provided listless men with the opportunity for casual coitus, Los Angeles' brothels and bordellos thrived amid a Hollywood that was yet to fully form. Our site's own Madame, Liz Goldwyn constructs a fiction (based largely on actual events encountered within her extensive research) of flop houses, feathered lamps, and fast cash for love. This was how the West was done.
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Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.
Pinkola Estes catalogs lupine female figures in mythology, folklore, and fairytales who aren't content to just sit around and howl at the moon. A global assortment of iconoclastic protagonists break the narrative, gendered mold, inspiring readers to live boldly on their own terms.
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Fragments From The Delta Of Venus. Art and Introduction by Judy Chicago. Text Selections from Anais Nin
Judy Chicago's illustrations—as witty and vibrant as they are visually sensual—accompany her mentor Anais Nin's famed erotic poems. Sometimes pens (pencils, and watercolor brushes) are indeed mightier than swords ;)
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The Pearl: A Journal of Voluptuous Reading, The Underground Magazine of Victorian England. Three Volumes Complete in One
Temperatures rise and complexions grow flushed within these bawdy, Victorian tales of the erotic. Potentially hyperbolic flourishes hint at tinges of satire, but only for the purpose of spicing pleasure with giggles.
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Delta of Venus, Erotica by Anais Nin
Nin links imagination with immeasurable pleasures throughout these vibrant tales of surrendering to desire. Her protagonists bound past propriety as they chase euphorically sensual highs.
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Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille
Bataille considers—rather controversially—eroticism as it manifests in life, death, and all in between. Along the way, he dares to view war, mythology, and economies through his iconoclastically sex-centric lens.
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Venus in Furs and Selected Letters of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
These letters between lovers chronicle the arc of a deviant brand of desire, as it manifests within coitus-correspondence. Von Sacher-Masoch's penchant for a femme-dom in fur-trimmed frocks, adds delightful sartorial flair.
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The Sexual Outlaw A Documentary by John Rechy
When sex is not only political but also professional in nature, virtually nothing remains off limits. This snapshot of a male sex worker's days and nights spent on LA's gritty, 1970's streets leaves little to the imagination and few questions unasked (even if some remain unanswered).
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The Art of Love by Ovid
These assembled secrets of seduction and tricks of coital conquest shocked Ovid's Roman contemporaries in his day. Fast forward to the contemporary and you will be fascinated by how the more things change the more flings stay the same.
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House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata
Three tales of isolation frame legendary storyteller Kawabata's narrative exploration of sex as it effects the human condition. Though Japanese in their cultural contextualization, these glimpses into the expanses of sensuality prove universal in their unearthing of desire's hidden complexities.
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