The Ninja (1980), Eric Van Lustbader. The year is 1985. Less another country, more a different galaxy. We are familiar with the mechanics of lust, but only through “when a man and woman love each other very much”, hippie lies and primordial AIDS public information. When breasts are seen on TV, we talk like we witnessed an eclipse in class the next day. It’ll be a decade plus until a boner slips by UK video censors. Adult erections themselves remain a paradoxically fragile phenomenon – Kentish chemists won’t note the side effects of sildenafil, aka Viagra, for a couple more years. But the shorts of schoolboys are a different matter, and once my schoolfriend Darren and I have read all the children’s books at the local library, we’re allowed into the adult section, where I alight upon a blockbuster promising both sex and ninjas. There’s one scene that transforms my puppy-like tentpole into an inflamed, almost painful purple. It progresses: dude lies on his back, mast at full flag; woman re-enters from the kitchen with red-hot chisel and applies tool to tool. It’s an abrupt initiation into the fucked-up world of adult desire. I close the book, and when my mum sees it by my bed, she says, “That’s not really for children.” It was a fair point, but a bit late.Peter Lyle, writer

///

I recently lent a friend my copy of Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). It’s been years since I read it, but I remember how it reverberated, somehow, in my body, and I wanted him to feel that too. A few days later, he sent me a paragraph that had caught his eye. “Now he was straddling my chest, and his cock was sliding over my lips. A second later, he’d swung around, and we were sucking each other, lying on our sides, Romulus and Remus, before the wolf arrived to nurse them. In the hall light that came in through the open door, I could see the red veins in his translucent scrotum, autumn leaf, and I looked up the crack in his ass. My mind reeled in a drunk waltz back and forth between my cock and his, between getting and spending.” Oh, that’s right, I thought. That’s the sort of thing that reverberates. So there you have it, the sexiest thing I’ve ever read is “autumn leaf”.Huw Lemmey, author

///

On Thursday, 21 January 1926, Vita Sackville-West wrote from Milan to Virginia Woolf in London: “You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences.”Amia Srinivasan, philosopher

///

This would be “things” such as Cosey Fanni Tutti doing her “interventions” in jazz magazines, Henry Miller’s Cosmodemonic employee doing it on the pavement in Sexus (1949), performance poet Lydia Lunch rutting with the careless abandon of a rakish bloke in a memoir (inscribed: “My Mouth Your Cunt Cave”). There’s Anne Desclos’ Story of O (1954): I had the manuscript nearby once, so I am particularly fond. There’s also a badly written, scruffily illustrated pornographic typescript sort of book called The Pharmacy, which was largely about getting an assistant to stand on a ladder, with lame blurry photos, and was written in the worst English I have ever read. Most of all, there is the pair of handmade French erotic illustrated books by Rémi Beaudar. From the same catalogue of mine, with piles of French erotica, I also love the sapphic phone sex photo on the cover of Les Confidences amoureuses de Lucile et Florette (1935) by Jacques Delaplace. As well as the frontispiece illustration of an ecstatic gamahuche obsessive in search of, as the title puts it, Odor di Femina (1959).Carl Williams, rare book dealer

///

A secret thrill of mine is placing late-night email orders to Burley Fisher Books and collecting them days later, avoiding eye contact. It is a unique intimacy to be truly known only by your bookseller. My appetite for filth was evident but discreetly unspoken until, during one collection, I was recommended this zine, h( )le (2025) by e v, still hot and wet from the risograph.

e v writes about a blistered welt on their ankle with the obsession of a crush, the texture of body horror and the cadence of pornography. I was intensely activated, the pleasure in revulsion on my fingers: a buffet of grotesquerie. The text held me at the edge, yielding longer than felt sustainable.Sienna Murdoch, artist

///

For a few months as a 10 or 11-year-old, everything around me felt full of coded, scary and yet deeply thrilling, veiled sexual clues, and many of the books in my parents’ house acquired, at random, a groundless yet immense sexual charge. The charge obviously came from the fact that I hadn’t read the books and that I didn’t really know what sex was… and whatever sex was supposed to be like, and whatever things were in those books, not knowing was way more exciting than knowing.

Perhaps that’s part of why the first book that came to mind, when I was thinking about the “sexiest” book I’ve ever read, was The Ice Palace (1963) by Tarjei Vesaas. Obviously that book isn’t about sex at all, but the tension, charge and strangeness of Siss and Unn’s encounter – “this was not so simple – for some mysterious reason” – the anticipation – “on her way to Unn, quivering with expectancy” – and the sense of waiting to finally know something – “wonder what I shall find out at Unn’s. I’m sure to find out something. I’ve been waiting for it all the autumn…” – reminded me, more than anything else I’ve ever read, of the most intense pre-sexual feelings of early adolescence. Which, it sometimes feels like, sexuality itself has never really managed to displace…Harriet Armstrong, author

///

I was 15 or 16 years old and came across a collection of short stories that came with NITRO, a Greek lifestyle magazine. It was quite hot in the 1990s. There was one short story, by Manina Zoumboulaki, that particularly stuck with me. It was the story of a debutante making her way into a fashionable downtown Athens party, and it included a straight sex scene that fascinated me. I remember reading this at my grandparents’ summer house, where I’d spend my summers and wanting to go to such parties myself. I recently found this little book again in Greece and brought it with me to my Berlin flat. I reread the story and it still felt fresh!Spyros Rennt, photographer

///

I’ve been reviewing my zine collection recently in preparation for opening my zine library, and I’ve found all sorts of “sexy”, depending on your definition. Zines are the medium of the suppressed, so it’s no surprise that it attracts raunchy stuff. I have Dion Nolan’s Sex with Trans Men: Answers to All Your Awkward Questions (2025), which is all about sex, but isn’t sexy. I finally got my hands on a copy of Black Lodge Press’s Cruising, a tastefully, tantalisingly illustrated ode to the practice which is more classically “sexy”. Less tasteful, but sexier still, is a concertina of Duncan Grant’s private drawings from an exhibition at Charleston, which lays everything very bare, concealed by a teasing envelope cover. It’s almost too sexy, though, and comes back around to camp, especially with some of the more impractical poses. If you want something erotic, then I’d say Court Nomadin’s Signals (2022), an electric, visceral story of pseudo-religious devotion to a pylon. I’ve never been able to look at a pylon the same way since.Jess Mead, zine librarian

///

Shuttlecock (1984), by Phil Andros. Was it the best? Maybe not, but it was the first, so it left its psychic dick print on me. The one-hander by Phil Andros (the pen name of professor, Kinsey collaborator and tattooist Samuel Steward), with its Tom of Finland cover illustration of seams-busting jacked-and-bricked dudes, was originally published in 1972 as Renegade Hustler. As a teenager in the late 1980s, I discovered the book on a rickety wire rack of pulp paperbacks in a musty used bookstore, then read everything Andros I could find – restless erotic adventures of a hustler looking for trouble, love, cash and loads. The pre-AIDS abandon of it all was hot. Steward had cranked out the Andros titles in the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s as peckeresques with the thinnest clothes lines of plot to hang all the filthy laundry on. His pulp-porn delivered dashes of ironic humour and an impressive tally of sucks, fucks and kinks. A hornball flaneur like John Rechy’s hustler-heroes in City of Night (1963) and Numbers (1967), minus interiority or psychogeographical social commentary (this is sleaze, honey). Later, I read much more literary filth, but Shuttlecock will always have my clunky-porn heart.Nate Lippens, author

///

The sexiest thing I have ever read is my own mind. Your own subconscious can come up with just the things to titillate you most, because it knows you, it is you.

Every single person holds hidden fantasies in their minds, things that have welled up from the depths that they have never shared with anyone. They probably feel slightly ashamed of these fantasies, as we live in a culture weaned on sexual shame. Take heart! We are sexual beings; these things are naturally arising, and that which feels taboo or shrouded in darkness will probably have the most poignancy.

While I was excavating my psyche for An Exorcism, my gothic romance series, I deliberately conjured all the deepest (sometimes darkest) fantasies I could find locked away inside. I then did my best to express them in images and words.

When I was a schoolgirl, I discovered D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). At the time it was taboo, so I found it super sexy. I read it in secret on the way home from school on the train. Although this is probably not the sexiest writing ever, the fact that I was doing something illicit held the thrill. Naughty is sexy.Penny Slinger, artist

///

I don’t know much about being sexy, but I do know the absolute sluttiest, horniest thing you can do as a woman is read On The Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac.The Femcels, musicians

///

I was maybe 20, I was getting on a cross-country bus to see my girlfriend, and I found on the seat a copy of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) that someone must have accidentally left behind. I picked it up randomly. On the first page, the narrator speaks of a girl squatting in a saucer of milk, and seeing her pink and dark flesh cooling in the white milk. This, I was thinking, was pure literature; this was what literature was for, and I put it in my bag to read more intently on the journey. Then its rightful owner came back onto the bus to retrieve the precious book. She looked around, and she knew I was sitting in the seat she had been sitting in, but I denied seeing it. I did not want to give this book back to her, and she knew this, too. So the sexiness of the sentence blurred with the sexiness of this moment of shameful but unabashed stealing, and the intense excitement I was feeling at the hidden presence of the book, in the bag beside me.Adam Thirlwell, novelist

///

The unofficial erotica of my husband, the writer and artist Brad Phillips. Our romance, at least on my end, was sparked by it. I was living in China when we became online friends, and what followed was a long chain of intimate email exchanges. He would send me drafts of his erotic short stories that would eventually appear in issues of Sarah Nicole Prickett’s Adult Magazine and his collection of short stories, Essays & Fictions (2019). What has always struck me about his writing is his ability to write about women in sexual scenarios (and otherwise) in a way that feels expansive rather than reductive. His writing always leaves me feeling whole and not objectified. It is rare to encounter such a male voice. Rarer still is the experience of falling in love through that language, and rarest of all to marry the man who wrote them.Cristine Brache, artist and poet

///

One of the sexiest books I’ve ever read is Frenchman’s Creek (1941) by Daphne du Maurier. The novel follows Lady Dona St Columb, an upper-class woman who escapes the constraints of Restoration London society to retreat to her husband’s remote Cornish estate. There, she encounters the French pirate Jean-Benoit Aubéry, and through him discovers a world of freedom, adventure and passion. What stayed with me, reading it as a teenager, was the powerful sense of escapism and transformation. Lady Dona’s journey, dressing as a man, stepping into a different world, and embracing the physicality of life at sea, felt expansive and liberating. The elements of sun, air and movement, and the contrast between restriction and wildness, created something deeply sensual. Her relationship with Aubéry awakened not just romantic feelings, but a sense of aliveness, of inhabiting her body, her desires and her spirit more fully. It wasn’t simply about romance, but about discovering freedom, identity and the courage to step beyond expectation. I found it utterly transporting, and was especially moved by its suggestion that true sensuality and connection emerge from a deeper sense of freedom, of being able to discover who you are and to live that fully.Ita O’Brien, intimacy co-ordinator 

///

Simple Passion (1991) by Annie Ernaux. It was recommended by India Chambers of Casual Readers Club. Finished it in a day and it left me feeling… a lot.M.I.C., grime artist

///