A perfect gift of timeless erotic stories ranging from ancient Greek myth to modern stories of longing and lust. This beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology has a full-cloth binding and silk ribbon marker. Accounts of ardour and transgression also flow from unexpected pens: an astonishingly explicit scene from an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, and Guy de Maupassant's heated tale of a young peasant woman offering her breast to a starving stranger on a train. Hunger is the fierce undercurrent to these stories: the gnawing lust of one lover for another, or the greedy pursuit of a particular inclination. The elegant depravity of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, the dreamlike seductions of an Egyptian jinni in the form of a snake, the brutal anonymity of a highway truck-stop encounter - the stories in this richly varied collection reveal that the urge to articulate sexual desire is as inventive as it is timeless.

Author Biography

ROWAN PELLING is a British journalist and broadcaster who has contributed regularly to The Independent on Sunday, The Mail on Sunday, and GQ, and is now a columnist for The Daily Telegraph. She is the former editor of the monthly magazine The Erotic Review and was a judge of the Man Booker Prize in 2004.