From the innocent yearnings of Longus's Daphnis and Chloe to the sado-masochism of Pauline Réage's O and the glacial self-torture of Edith Templeton's carnally obsessed wartime heroine, Erotic Stories is an exploration of human desire in all it's complexity. Raw and intense, subtle and insinuating, the tales gathered here - by Boccaccio, Chekhov, Anaïs Nin, Michèle Roberts and Hanif Kureishi - are designed to arouse and unsettle. Stories of ardour and transgression flow from unexpected pens: an astonishingly explicit fragment from Edith Wharton's unfinished novel Beatrice Palmato, for example, and Guy de Maupassant's shocking fiction Idyll which describes a young peasant woman offering her breast to a starving stranger. Hunger is the fierce undercurrent to these tales: the gnawing lust of one lover for another, or the greedy pursuit of a particular inclination. From classic works of eighteenth-century French literature and the erotic elegance of Arabian fairy tales to the brutal subversiveness of modern counter-culture, this rich collection reveals that the urge to articulate sexual longing is as inventive as it is timeless.