The Globe and Mail

Arsinée Khanjian

Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death is poetry. It’s not a novel; it’s not a short story. It’s a long poem – an ontological one – about love or, rather, about the absence of love as a malady. Upon reading it, I dreamt of a play where Rilke and Duras would have an exchange of words surrounded by the sea and angels. How would they merge their obsessions about solitude, absence and God? What words would fuse their fantasies of love, lust and passion?

Arsinée Khanjian recently starred in a production of Cruel and Tender, by Martin Crimp, directed by Atom Egoyan.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, for the simple reason that it is the first book I know of to show the terrible consequence of child sexual abuse. In fact, although Nabokov railed against Freud (“the quack from Vienna”), on this important point they were one. Freud was the first to show, in scientific language, the damage that can ensue to a child who has been sexually abused. He did this in 1896. Whether Nabokov knew it or not, Freud was there first. But Nabokov put this into the shape of an extraordinary novel. The only problem is that, unlike the author, many readers were fooled into believing that the blame for the abuse lay with Lolita herself. It did not, and the book is a very moral tale about the dangers of the lack of empathy and the trauma inflicted on others by narcissists such as Humbert Humbert.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is an American author and scholar of Sanskrit and Indian studies, living in New Zealand. He is best known for works on Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.

Mette Bach

If titillation begins in the mind, then Angela Carter has knocked the socks off of more women than any florist or chocolatier could ever aspire to. Her stories are fantasy fodder for word nerds and mystical retellings of familiar tales. Though it has been years since I read her short story The Tiger’s Bride, I still can’t think of Beauty and the Beast without blushing.

Mette Bach is a B.C. writer, broadcaster and playwright, and a writing instructor at Langara College. Her most recent book was Off the Highway: Growing Up in North Delta.

Scott Turow

When I was a youth, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer had a great following among young men, mostly because of the efforts to ban them. I loved both writers, but the sex was generally not in accord with my fantasies. I preferred John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748) for pure erotic wallop. That was a book that was brazenly meant to be a dirty book. As a grown-up, I found Susanna Moore’s In the Cut way, way hot.

Scott Turow is an American lawyer and the author of eight legal thrillers and two non-fiction books.

Erika Ritter

Okay, maybe you recall Marian Engel’s Bear as more “eww!” than “aaah!” Who’d want to get it on with a stinky old bruin deficient both in pillow talk and personal hygiene? Yet, Engel brings compelling carnality to her tale of wordless, unsanitized Otherness, when a sad-assed tame bear meets a female academic wild enough to explore her own inner animal. It’s a sly send-up of romance in the wilderness with a strong, silent and utterly obliging male. But there’s also genuine passion – and compassion. Arousing in a conventional sense? No. But beautifully beastly.

Erika Ritter is a Canadian playwright, novelist, humorist, essayist, radio broadcaster, journalist, public speaker and stage performer.

Bill Richardson

Can something as wry as The Platonic Blow can be called erotic? Rarely has fellatio been more nobly and formally parsed than in this 1948 ballad that W.H. Auden disavowed having written, but that no one else could have managed with such panache. It's easy to find online, but when I was a graduate student, a century ago, I had to get it from UBC’s interlibrary loan department by requesting the periodical in which it first appeared, in 1965: Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. The librarian, alas, never flinched, which rather took the blow out of my sails.

Bill Richardson is a Vancouver-based writer and broadcaster, and the co-author (with Veda Hille) of the recent theatrical revue Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata.

Linda Griffiths

The erotic Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving.

It was forbidden love, but I’d read the book years ago and didn’t remember the title or why it was forbidden. What stayed with me was how the woman and man dealt with overpowering desire. The depth of their passion remained clear in my mind – it had been building for years and was becoming unbearable. The man suggests they deal with it head-on – have sex as many times as possible in one night and never again. In her bedroom, they unleash themselves. They do it once, then again, then again. Three times is often a limit but not to this pair. They do it until they are raw and sore. They lie exhausted, believing they’re sated. He says, “Again.” They both groan, no they can’t, it’s impossible, they are done, but she is wet again, he rises again. They will never do it again. Then I remembered why it was forbidden – they are brother and sister. I had to ask myself why this scene penetrated so deeply. It must be the intensity, the progress through an extreme sexual experience involving sin and pain and pleasure. Eros grins.

Linda Griffiths is an award-winning playwright and actor. Her new projects include a companion piece to her Governor-General’s Award-nominated play, The Darling Family. The new play is called HeavenAbove/HeavenBelow.

Laura Penny

Picking one’s favourite erotic literature is an exercise in self-incrimination. If I confess that I have a soft spot for Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye then you might surmise I enjoy recreational urination and the creative use of eggs. So, I’ll pick an icy hot story about incriminating oneself: U.S. writer Amy Hempel’s Offertory. Like many of Hempel’s wry, incisive stories, it is about storytelling, as the narrator offers her lover tales about her ménages à trois with a married couple to hold him in her thrall. Warning: Contains salty language, adult situations and brutal honesty about brutal honesty.

Laura Penny is the author of Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit and, more recently, More Money Than Brains: Why School Sucks, College is Crap, and Idiots Think They're Right.

Claudia Dey

It seems to me a decent idea to secure a copy of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and a blindfold. Now, cover your eyes and flip through the pages of the book. Point your finger at a passage, remove the blindfold and read the passage aloud. You will, I wager, land upon something erotic. Erotic, how? Erotic, most immediately, in its language: all muscle and precision and swagger. Erotic too, in what is withheld. The erotic begs for negative space, and Ondaatje cuts his out brilliantly. With its dyers, tunnellers, bridge-builders, tanners, bakers, throat-cutter, falling nun, actress, thief, searcher, the book is as much about the risks of industry as it is about the risks of love; together, this is the story of being human.

Claudia Dey is a novelist and playwright. Her most recent book is How to Be a Bush Pilot.

Susan Swan

When I was young, the most erotic books for me were the novels and stories that depicted sex from a female perspective, an unusual view in the fifties when mostly everything written about sexual love was by men. So discovering the novel Peyton Place by American writer Grace Metalious hidden in my mother’s jewellery drawer was an erotic revelation. I remember the shock and thrill of her lover exclaiming that Constance Mackenzie’s nipples were as “hard as diamonds.” It seems laughable now, and I had some fun with that phrase in one of my novels, but back then it was a profound discovery, that men could admire women’s bodies in a frank, delighted way. I was after authenticity in other words, because so many descriptions in erotic stories didn’t correspond to how my own body reacted, and phrases like “his torso stiffening with desire” in old Harlequin romances left me genuinely perplexed.

As an older woman, I’m less easily pleased. I want some thoughtfulness in erotic fiction, so I’m going to plug for Ninety Million Miles Away, by my friend Barbara Gowdy in her short story collection We So Seldom Look at Love. The focus of her collection is not erotica, although this story is one of the most brilliant and sensual pieces of writing I’ve ever read about how women experience desire. It describes a young woman displaying herself to a man in the apartment building opposite hers, and then meeting the man who sparked this behaviour. The narrator observes, “…in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.” I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the story.

Susan Swan’s last novel, What Casanova Told Me, is being offered as a Valentine special to Canadian book clubs and libraries.

Molly Peacock

The truly erotic secretly thrives inside the rhythms of poems, sometimes far more than in the actual words. In Love Is Not All (part of a delicious sonnet sequence about her adulterous affair with a younger man), Edna St. Vincent Millay slyly arouses the rhythm of intercourse underneath images of drowning, where men “sink / and rise and sink and rise and sink again.” Savvy but vulnerable, Millay knows she’ll never “trade the memory of this night for food,” even though sex itself is nourishment – as 17th-century English mystic poet George Herbert wrote in his provocatively oral sacred poem, Love III: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:/ So I did sit and eat.”

Peter Chiykowski, a student of medieval literature at Dalhousie University, wrote a recent Valentine to his love titled Notes from the Canary Islands, included in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011. Twisting Millay’s marine imagery, Chiykowski lets the speaker of his poemsuccumb to the sheer repetition of “I miss you/and/I miss you/and/ I miss you.” Now these are very simple words, but the quality of their longing is created by their lonely, masturbatory pace. The tempo of a metaphor itself is erotic.

“Two waterfalls we were/ The night we lived all night,” poet Phillis Levin writes in Nocturne, sensuously displacing two bodies with the motion of two bodies of water. But the ultimate cadence of coital play belongs to John Donne in a poem written 400 years ago, To His Mistress, Going to Bed. Donne, that metaphysical bad boy of love poetry, knew that the measure of sex is in the positions, or, in this case, the prepositions, where the lover’s “roving hands … go/ Before, behind, between, above, below.” Eros pulses in every iamb. If, as Millay says, I had to be “pinned down by need and moaning for release,” I’d choose her poem as the most erotic. As in all my succulent favourites (most of which can be found in the treasure trove of Representative Poetry Online, www.rpo.library.utoronto.ca), sex isn’t so much in the words as in the moves.

Molly Peacock's most recent book is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72.