My Literary Erotica Hit List
Desire, power, and everything in between
Welcome to Lust in Translation, a newsletter exploring what ignites your pleasure, confidence, and desire—by yours truly, sexologist Natassia Miller. If you’re new here, now’s the perfect time to subscribe!
Your largest sexual organ is your brain.
It’s why when we read erotica, desire doesn’t just awaken—it expands.
We begin to notice not only what turns us on, but why.
The anticipation. The slow reveal. The way a single sentence can make your pulse quicken and your breath deepen.
Research backs it up: studies show that women who regularly read erotica report higher levels of sexual arousal and satisfaction (Lehmiller, 2018).
Reading about sex becomes a mirror for the inner worlds we rarely show. It’s about the search for meaning through the body.
The way lust can collapse the distance between two people—or widen it entirely. The way we use eroticism to make sense of freedom, art, identity, and love.
Here are some of my favorite books that explore those ideas. Each one seduces not only through its sensuality but through its curiosity about what desire reveals about us.
A collection of interconnected short stories written in the 1940s, Delta of Venus moves through bohemian Paris and beyond, where artists, dreamers, and lovers explore the boundaries of pleasure.
Nin writes of women and men who watch, confess, seduce, and surrender, often in ways that blur fantasy and reality. Each story reveals how power, curiosity, and imagination fuel desire, making this one of the most psychologically rich portraits of erotic life ever written.
Set in 1930s colonial Vietnam, this semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old French girl who begins a passionate affair with an older Chinese lover. Their relationship defies class, race, and convention, unfolding in stolen moments and suffocating heat.
Duras writes not for shock, but for truth. How longing can both define and destroy a life. It’s an exploration of power, shame, and the hunger to be seen.
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. – Catherine Millet
Part erotic memoir, part philosophical investigation, Millet recounts her years immersed in Paris’s sexual underground — from orgies to anonymous encounters — with startling honesty and detachment.
But the book isn’t just about sex. It’s about identity, art, and the way physical experience shapes our sense of self. Her gaze is clinical and courageous, turning the body into a canvas of inquiry rather than spectacle.
In this cult classic of 1950s erotica, a young woman travels to Bangkok and finds herself initiated into a world of sensual exploration. Guided by her husband’s friends and a mysterious older woman, Emmanuelle learns to embrace her desires without guilt or restraint.
The novel moves between philosophy and pleasure, treating erotic experience as a spiritual awakening. It’s exotic, provocative, and quietly revolutionary.
A Sport and a Pastime – James Salter
Told through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, this novel chronicles a love affair between a young American student and a French shop girl in provincial France. Their relationship is observed, imagined, and mythologized by the storyteller — blurring what is real and what is fantasy.
Salter’s prose is sparse but luminous, transforming erotic encounters into meditations on memory, power, and beauty.
Kink – edited by Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon
This anthology brings together some of today’s most daring literary voices — including Carmen Maria Machado, Roxane Gay, and Alexander Chee — to explore sex and power through modern lenses. The stories move between tenderness and brutality, featuring queer love, role-play, taboo, and the complex politics of vulnerability.
It’s a collection that insists that kink is about truth-telling.
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
A love story with no assigned gender to its narrator, this novel unravels an affair between the storyteller and a married woman. As the relationship intensifies, so does the narrator’s obsession with her body — every scar, every freckle — until love and anatomy become indistinguishable.
Winterson turns longing into language, crafting a story about desire, loss, and the impossibility of ownership.
A series of short stories about young women navigating casual sex and emotional hunger in the 1980s. Minot writes in sharp, spare sentences that capture the dissonance between physical closeness and emotional distance.
Her characters move through encounters that promise connection but often leave them lonelier; a haunting look at the quiet ache of female sexuality in a world that doesn’t know how to hold it.
Set in a well-to-do Massachusetts suburb during the 1960s, Couples follows ten couples whose lives intertwine through affairs, betrayals, and fragile marriages. It’s a portrait of postwar America’s sexual revolution — glossy on the surface, hollow underneath.
Updike examines how liberation can still carry loneliness, and how intimacy becomes both escape and prison.
Inspired by real events in 1920s Paris, this novel tells the story of Rafaela, a young Italian model, and Tamara de Lempicka, the modernist painter who immortalized her in art — and in bed.
Their relationship is as creative as it is carnal, a collision of power, beauty, and jealousy. Avery’s writing is rich with color, texture, and danger. A reminder that art and desire are often two sides of the same obsession.
Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous – Gillian Anderson
A mesmerizing anthology of fantasies anonymously submitted by women around the world. Anderson curated the collection — and contributed one of her own stories — to create a tapestry of voices that range from playful to dark, tender to unapologetically raw.
Want reads like a shared secret among strangers, each fantasy revealing how imagination becomes its own form of liberation.
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Now I’m curious: What are your favorite erotic reads?
Share them in the comments so we can crowdsource a living library.
And if this list inspired you, please share it with a friend. The more we talk about desire, the less alone we are in it.
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I'm a Spy in the House of Love gal, myself. Fun list. I'm most into true stories lately.
The Lover is one of my all time favorites—and agree that Updike can do surprisingly sexy things. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is also super hot with a riveting narrative.