Barnaby Conrad - 101 Best Sex Scenes Ever Written: An Erotic Romp Through Literature for Writers and Readers

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
Hemingways Spain
The Complete Guide to Writing Fiction
Name Dropping
Snoopys 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 storiesAuthorship. 2. Erotic storiesTechnique. 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

809.3'93543dc22

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, Anis Nin, John OHara, 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 allor mostlyabout sex.
Anthony Burgess

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

Sex is Gods joke on human beings.
Bette Davis

S INCE SEX IS MANKINDS OLDESTAND MOST IMPORTANTPASTIME, 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 Audens 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 Smiths acclaimed novel, Strange Fruit, was banned in Massachusetts because of the authors 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 wasnt 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 Joness 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 wordscunt, shit, and prickbut 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 husbands 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 Ive had a couple of drinks but would you mind lookin over hereyeah, there in the grass thereis that what I think it is? And Lucinda says, Oh Godpoor Johnny Bobbitt!)

What exactly is obscenitys 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 definedor 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 wouldnt have expected, eliciting, for example: Why, I didnt even remember that multi-paged sex scene in