Throwback Thursday: Top 5 Best Erotica Reads

If you loved E L James’ raunchy novel Fifty Shades of Grey and need replacement erotica with which to blow your hair back this winter – celebrated Brisbane erotica author Krissy Kneen has the answer. And Kneen should know what makes for good, sexy, sensual erotica – the type that’s so good it makes you sex-ready – she is the author of Swallow the Sound, a collection of short erotic fiction; her memoir, Affection, was published in 2009 and shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the ABIA Award in 2010.

She is also the author of the erotic adventure, Triptych, which was published in 2011. Steeplechase, published in 2013, was her first non-erotic novel. And the author has also had short fiction and non-fiction published at nerve.com, in Best Women’s Erotica 2013, Griffith Review and Island Magazine.

In addition, Kneen has been busy reading classic erotica for the last two years researching her new erotic adventure Holly’s Incredible Adventures in the Sex Machine (working title) due to be published in 2015. Here, the acclaimed author/writer and bookseller shares her Top 5 Best Erotica Reads Of All Time:

1. Little Birds by Anais Nin. This book is a really lovely introduction into erotica. It is a bit of a crowd pleaser. It’s really dirty, but also quite sweet in parts. I love Nin. She was writing for private collectors at $1 a page and she has been so playful with the work.

2. Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. This book is seriously bent. Bataille was a surrealist and he plumbs the depths of our imaginations when he presents the story where the central motif is an eye or an egg or an oval shape. I do love this book, but careful, it is a weird one and so perverse.

3. Story of O by Pauline Reage was published anonymously and at first it was thought that it was written by a man. It wasn’t: it was a woman and she knew what she was doing when she said to her husband that a woman could be as perverse as de Sade (French author and philosopher Marquis de Sade). This isn’t de Sade, but it is much more to my personal taste. This book made me really reconsider the idea of submission. O is a submissive and she proves that submission can make you very powerful indeed. A great S&M novel!

4. Ian McEwan is usually not considered an erotic writer, but his work all simmers with eroticism. In Between the Sheets is a collection of stories and most of them have a dark, but sexy erotic heart. Definitely read this book with one hand.

5. Landscape with Animals by Sonya Hartnett writing as Cameron S. Redfern. This is no YA novel (young-adult fiction). Sonya published it under the pseudonym to protect her reputation as a children’s writer. This is such a great book. It’s so sexy and complex: some of the best erotic writing ever to come out of Australia.

By Nicole Carrington-Sima