SACRED SINS is a collection of seductive short stories and fables in a new genre of intellectual erotica. They are fantasy of the highest order, allusive, mythic and archetypal. They are feminist and heroic, literate, mysterious, experimental, and spiritual.  John Diamond-Nigh re-imagines erotica itself as agile, sophisticated literature calling on a wide range of moods, voices, and evocative techniques. Encapsulated in a tiny fictional space, each tale presents a miniaturized tableau that seduces and challenges the reader with mischief, humor, and allegory.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SACRED SINS

“34 brief fictions of flagrant impiety, uncommon cultivation, and a tendency toward abstraction, all of which seem decisively French and vaguely archaic. Literary heretics such as Baudelaire, Bataille, even Lautréamont come to mind. The single American writer I can invoke with similar compulsions and narrative pace is John Hawkes. Notable precedents, these, for John Diamond-Nigh’s auspicious debut prose collection, Sacred Sins.” —Harold Jaffe

“…a surreal, oneiric, mythic and mystic journey through the erotic cults of contemporaneous antiquity. John Diamond-Nigh stages esoteric tableaux whose incunabula take us into the cloistered cells and secret chambers of the imagination. There his narratives weave art, music and literature into profane cuni-linguistic realms, love-cantos laced with epidermal explorations, atavistic colors and the holiness of sex. He casts all this and more onto the scene of language where delirious epiphanies whip desire into orgasmic play.” —Ben Stoltzfus, author of Cat O’Nine Tails

“John Diamond-Nigh juxtaposes and assimilates the religious and the profane, the classical and the modern. All our senses awake in this surreal world of lust and eroticism, where bodily desire and satisfaction transcend the physical experience, a union of opposites as the sexual and spiritual are bound together. Beautifully written, these sensual short stories are delectable sins grazed by the sacred and fused together by the poetic expertise of its author.”  —Petra Anne Hawk

“John Diamond-Nigh’s Sacred Sins is a masterful collection of beautifully erotic prose blended with a poet’s hand.” —Mark Axelrod

“Part history lesson, part dream, reading this sensual delight feels like languidly flipping through the best kept secret diary. Reminiscent of Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, Sacred Sins sticks with the reader for its clever plot and beautiful writing. Much recommended.”
—Suzanne Burns

ORDER ON AMAZON

About the Author

John Diamond Nigh’s temperament and training in interdisciplinary arts and literature has led to his profuse, eclectic and aesthetic work and lifestyle.  As a poet, he has published in many renowned journals such as The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review and Agni, and brought out a book titled Labyrinths.  The Smithsonian included an important wood bowl he had created in a retrospective of seminal works of wood turners at the end of the 20th century. Other sculptures have been exhibited throughout the U.S., and his interior design work has won several awards.

Before moving to the South, every year John and his wife traveled to Paris or Florence or Barcelona to teach, and often at night, when not engaged in those responsibilities, John followed the ghosts of Montparnasse into their balls and revels. Presently he lives with her and four cats in Asheville, NC. where he’s putting the finishing touches on a house that he designed and built (including the inside décor and furniture) and that now hosts several lively salons.