Tag: libertine literature

SADE’S SATIRICAL NOVELLA

In this rare novella by the Marquis de Sade, a marriage is arranged between the aging Judge de Fontanis and a young woman, Mademoiselle de Téroze, who (unbeknownst to him) is in love with someone else. The young woman and her brother-in-law (the Marquis d’Olincourt) perpetrate a series of practical jokes, humiliating hoaxes and elaborate schemes in order to deceive the judge and stop him from consummating the marriage.

This amusing tale is an artfully-written and beautifully-structured literary attack on the judiciary, and one of Sade’s most savagely satirical texts.

A JUDGE DECEIVED
Marquis de Sade
Translated from the French by R J Dent
Pocket Erotica #24
pp., 174; paper, $14.95

Two other humorous works by the Marquis de Sade are also available in the Pocket Erotica series.

SADE STRIKES AGAIN!

The merry Marquis de Sade is back with another witty chapbook in our Pocket Erotica series. The Self-Made Cuckold, translated from the French by RJ Dent, follows in the footsteps of the author’s Retaliation (Pocket Erotica #17), a similarly rare work sans the notorious content he is known for. Indeed, both titles contain no savage orgies nor flagellation. These little gems are —by comparison to The 120 Days of Sodom—libertine light and amusingly smutty. There are also strains of feminism running through both books.

For those who have never encountered de Sade, it should be pointed out that he was a gifted stylist whose sentences were exquisitely crafted. Here is how The Self-Made Cuckold begins:

One of the greatest deficiencies of ill-bred people is that they constantly utter a host of indiscretion, slanders or defamations on everyone that breathes, very often in the presence of people they do not really know. One cannot imagine the number of problems that this sort of idle chatter causes: what honest man can stand by and hear evil spoken about someone he cares for without reprimanding the fool who said it?

Indeed, who could ignore such an indignity, but that’s beside the point. The purpose of the quotation is to offer you an
hors d’oeuvre, the lilt and flow of the text.

We trust you’ll enjoy this humorous little feast.

The Self-Made Cuckold
Marquis de Sade
Translated by RJ Dent
Pocket Erotica No. 20
Paper; 60 pp., $10
ISBN 978-1737371199

The Lighter Side of Sade

Did the notorious author of Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom have a sense of humor? 

Indeed he did, and this short story shows a side of the author few have seen. Here is a witty, libertine tale, free of flagellation and sexual perversion. Instead, it reveals a husband’s adultery and a wife’s clever “retaliation.”  

This is a decidedly feminist text and it punctures the double standard still infecting relations between men and women.

Translated from the French by R J Dent.

Comte Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade

Customers in the UK can order the book here

Read My Lips . . .

Lawrence Hamilton has selected spicy excerpts from an anonymous English translation of Denis Diderot‘s satiric libertine novel, Les Bijoux Indiscrets (The Indiscreet Toys, 1749). Our edition, titled  From Their Lips to His Ear, is # 6 in the Pocket Erotica series— little,  4 x 6-inch editions, lovingly designed for collectors, yet priced inexpensively.

Denis Diderot was a highly celebrated 18th century French  philosopher & editor of the groundbreaking Encyclopédie. In 1748, in need of  money, he wrote this scandalous and amusing libertine allegory whose hero, a sultan, is in possession of a magic ring. When aimed at female genitals, the ring prompts these private parts to speak — revealing a woman’s deepest sexual desires, experiences, and indiscretions. In this precursor to The Vagina Monologues, the women  are portrayed  as  powerful beings through their liberated  ideas and sexuality.

“…filled with the strings of sexual metaphors (both explicit and concealing) … a linguistic tour de force, a rhetorical experiment in verbalizing the obscene, and a representational puzzle, signaled by that deliberate act of veiling and unveiling.”

FROM THEIR LIPS TO HIS EAR
Denis Diderot
Pocket Erotica No. 6
71 pp., perfect-bound; $10
ISBN 978-1-7356159-1-2

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Hogarth’s Cottage

 “…what makes an artist great is having the courage to provoke and challenge.” —The New York Times

 

CLICK HERE for more titles in the Pocket Erotica series.

LADIES FIRST…

“…In Behn’s novels, women too can embrace the previously masculinized pleasures of power. In The Fair Jilt, the heroine Miranda pursues the most extreme forms of libertinism as she seduces a series of men, twice attempts to have murdered the sister who inconveniently limits her financial power, and demonstrates the conflation of sexual and religious subversion typical of both French and English Restoration libertinism as she tries to rape a priest.” —Tiffany Potter, Genre and Cultural Disruption: Libertinism and the Early English Novel


Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689) was an English playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer from the Restoration era. The Fair Jilt is the first English novel ever written by a woman. A trailblazer, Behn broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. This edition is a must-have literary classic.

The Fair Jilt:
The Amours of Prince Tarquin & Miranda
Aphra Behn
New Urge Editions
paper; 100 pp., $12.95
ISBN: 979-8565118872

Wanton Words, Ribald Rhymes, & Naughty Lyrics

AWAY with silks, away with lawn,
I’ll have no scenes or curtains drawn;
Give me my mistress as she is,
Dress’d in her nak’d simplicities:
For as my heart e’en so mine eye
Is won with flesh, not drapery.
—Robert Herrick

A lusty anthology featuring titillating odes by an array of libertine poets of the XVII and XVIII centuries (Robert  Herrick, John Donne, William Congreve, Thomas Campion, et al.)  The works include gentle celebrations of the female sex; witty & whimsical whispers designed to seduce; and urgent pleas of—in the words of André Breton—L’amour fou. In this surreal realm of ribald eros, Virginity is a lost cause and Sexual Pleasure reigns supreme.

Our edition is profusely illustrated —from maidenhead to toe!—with works by more than a dozen artists, including Édouard-Henri Avril, Vivant Denon, Amandine Doré, and Thomas Rowlandson. As volume 8 in the popular Pocket Erotica series, POEMS OF LUST & DESIRE makes a delicious stocking-stuffer for all the libertines on your holiday list.

illustration by André Collot

POEMS OF LUST & DESIRE
by Libertine Poets of the XVII and XVIII Centuries
Pocket Erotica  [№ 8 ]
Illustrated; 110 pp., $12
ISBN 978-1-7356159-8-1

No Social Distancing Here

THE SCHOOL OF WOMEN is #3 in our Pocket Erotica series. This is a brand new translation by Amandine Lévêque of Nicolas Chorier‘s libertine novel, L’Académie des dames (Paris, ca 1755). Our abbreviated, pocket-sized edition includes four of the original seven dialogues, as well as charming & explicit illustrations by the anonymous artist whose work accompanied the French edition. Chorier’s novel presents a series of witty, erotic dialogues between Tullie and her innocent cousin, Octavie whom she has been charged with initiating into the world of sexual pleasure. “ [Your mother] pleaded with me yesterday to instruct you in all the most hidden secrets of marriage, to teach you how you should act … In order to do this, my dear, we must sleep together this evening; I will act like your husband, and you will act like my wife…”  The School of Women Nicolas Chorier Translated from the French by Amandine Lévêque Introduction by Richard Robinson Pocket Erotica  [№ 3] New Urge Editions 131 pages; illustrated; perfect bound, paper; 4 x 6 inches;  $12 ISBN-13: 978-1-7348166-8-6 SOLD OUT

LOVE AMONG THE LIBERTINES

A COMING OF AGE. An arousing translation by Richard Robinson of a French libertine classic —naughty, romantic, edgy — a tale that digs below the naves of the 18th century “amphibious” world of sex and religion. Its hero, a young abbot, hones his secular skills and steals the “laurels” of sexual triumph from his choir of well-bred female trophies. A Coming of Age, originally La Morlière’s Ecclesiastical Laurels, unveils upper-society sexual shenanigans from out of the chapel and into the holy sanctuary of licentiousness and love.

This is No. 2 in the Pocket Erotica series from New Urge—compact (4 x 6-inch) perfect-bound  booklets that fit in your pocket or purse.

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LOOK FOR THIS IMPRINT

POCKET EROTICA BLASTS OFF!

We kick off July with the launch of this exciting  and collectible new series from our New Urge imprint: Pocket Erotica—featuring original translations  of classic and obscure works of erotic literature. Each volume is a compact 4 x 6-inch paperback  with  a distinctive uniform design.

Pocket Erotica No. 1 is now available worldwide on Amazon:  DON’T TOUCH by Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon, translated from the French by Richard Robinson. A fun, lively, contemporary translation of an 18th century French libertine novella with a narrative technique that drops the soutanes, lifts the wimples, and pushes the boundaries of the novel – 150 years ahead of its time. Erotic, sacrilegious, funny and infectious, it is the “amorous true story,” as told by herself, Saint Nitouche, a Carmelite Extern Nun, whose “taste for pleasure and vocation for retreat” bump up against each other in surprisingly modern and eternally scandalous ways in the convent and in the bawdy house. Still scandalous today,  it is like Thérèse Finds Happiness, but without the philosophy.

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An arousing translation of a French libertine tale —naughty, romantic, edgy —that digs below the naves of the 18th century “amphibious” world of sex and religion. Its hero, a young abbot, hones his secular skills and steals the “laurels” of sexual triumph from among his choir of well-bred female trophies. A Coming of Age, originally La Morlière’s Ecclesiastical Laurels, unveils upper-society sexual shenanigans from out of the chapel and into the holy sanctuary of licentiousness and true love.

… desperate not to lose so beautiful a moment of passion, I was already employing the baluster in a way that was, perhaps, unknown to bishops and prelates; she was following along with my reasoning, I was about to give her a taste of its energy; &, in spite of the uncomfortableness of the position, I put forward the DEFINITIVE ARGUMENT: she was not without some distrust in its success, but I was going to destroy her disbelief. Already we were united to the extent of being one, alreadyI was insinuating myself adroitly into her… heart;… I had her half-way… persuaded, when the accursed chambermaid whom we certainly were not expecting, entered brusquely & surprised us; the marchioness was in a bit of a dubious position, & I was deploying my brilliant… state, covered in… glory; in such a state that, in a word, of all my honest readers and critics together, three quarters of them will be more envious of me than imitators….

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