“Playing”

The LA times has an interesting article on serious literature with a kinky bent.

Now, when whatever suits your fancy is easily found online, exploring intense or unusual sexuality has become the purview of commercial and even highbrow literary writers too. Tom Wolfe indulgently explored coed hookup culture in “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” Walter Mosley’s “sexistential novel,” “Killing Johnny Fry,” starts with sodomy and gets dirtier and darker from there. Later this year, Chuck Palahniuk will publish “Snuff,” about a female porn star’s attempt at a record for most sex partners in one day, partially told from the perspective of participant No. 600. Memoirists such as Catherine Millet and Toni Bentley aim at highbrow readers as they describe sex lives many wouldn’t dare imagine.

Sex writer and blogger Susie Bright, who has edited several anthologies of erotica, noted that — as fashion popularizes S&M-style clothing, sitcoms make graphic jokes about sex positions and novelists continue to mix elements of genre and literary writing — publishers have become open to printing books that take up sex.

“I don’t know if you can write literary fiction these days and pretend sex doesn’t exist,” Bright said

MV