?Fierce, captivating, revolutionary. A dazzling collection that will win hearts and change minds.?-Elif Shafak; ?These voices are furious, witty, outrageous, tender and entranced. This collection offers much delightful entertainment and fresh perspectives on women and sex in the Middle East.? -Marina Warner
Arab women have been the subject of male fantasies and myths about the East for centuries, while for many within the Arab world today, women who confess to sexual pleasure are still taboo. But it is a little-known secret that Arabic literature has a long tradition of erotic writing. This ground-breaking collection celebrates these women?s voices who dare to articulate their own desires with artistry and skill.

These stories and poems of lust and erotica lay bare the most private, prohibited, and primitive sexual experiences and awakenings. Enter and experience tantalising encounters in Parisian bars, stumble across dark confessions whispered in forgotten Beiruti alleyways, and be seduced by old friends learning to love again unexpectedly in later life.

Wherever these fantasies take us, there is no such thing as a typical sexual encounter ? and there never has been ? as this exhilarating anthology shows through 7000 years of Arab female writing on lust and erotica. Writers both classical and contemporary, including Adania Shibli, Isabella Hammad, Hanan Al Shaykh, Hoda Barakat, Leila Aboulela, Joumana Haddad and Leila Slimani, convey the complexities, intrigues and thrill of the chase, inviting you to share their written women?s most private moments.
Biografía del autor
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction. Her debut novel Out of It (Bloomsbury) was named a Guardian Book of the Year by Ahdaf Soueif and Marina Warner. Her radio play The Brick was nominated for the Imison Award and produced by BBC Radio 4. She has also published numerous short stories with Granta, Wasafiri, Saqi, Telegram and International PEN, and is a PEN and Pushcart Nominee. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French.
Epigram:

?But isn?t sex love? Love and sex are two sides of the same coin. What is love without sex? The veneration of a statue, of a Madonna. What is sex without love? Nothing more than a clash of genital organs.? Galliarda Sapienza, The Art of Joy

Love and Strange Horses ? Elegia Erotica

By

Nathalie Handal

A horse. A stranger. An anthem. An impossible thereafter.

A lonely rift. A grove of trees. A touch. A cry. A murmur.

In what hours do lovers arrive?

In what hour did mine arrive?

How deep must he be touched to enter?

.How deep must he enter to touch?

My lips. Body. Flesh. The curve of my neck.


Horse. Stranger. Anthem.

This love is behind us. In front of us.

This is the bed. Sheet. Table. This is the room, empty.

Or is this now, an elegy to strange horses,

an erotica slipping into a body of questions.


drink me, smash me

By

Naila Elamin

the long fingers are resting.
one hand on the small of my back
the other around my neck

pressing and pulling
caressing and hurting

the pale long midriff fits perfectly
roundly, between my thighs
like a cup on a saucer

drink me smash me
I want to feel your thumbs pressing my orbits
diaphragm deflated by the weight of your knee
your hipbone blooming bruises on my shank

my arms are flaying the darkest air
I gasp like fish on the shore
my head in your hands, turned the other way
as you leave for the wilderness, again and again


The Many Lives of Laila

By

Shurooq Amin

There?s the sharp Laila who closes a deal with a click of her high-powered heels; and there?s the knockout Laila who sparkles on a Saturday night on the coolest dancefloor in L.A., witty husband in tow; there?s the stressed Laila ? cortisol-pumped ?who clones herself in multiples for family decrees, gym, laundromat, office and grocery needs; and there?s sanctimonious Laila who fasts every Ramadan, prays in the women?s side of the mosque on Friday, attends funerals ? black abbaya stashed in the trunk for just such drudgeries; but of all the lives of Laila, the one she loathes the most is the guilty Laila who stifles moans of pleasure when, cocooned in night?s velvet, in the dark of her loins, her lover?s semen seeps.


A Map of Home

By

Randa Jarrar

THE COOL THING about Baba being gone was I could do whatever I wanted. One night I lied and told Mama I was sleeping over at Jiji?s and I indulged myself and took a taxi, orange and rickety, its leather and driver scented with fumes, out to Montazah. I had fears, fantasies, of the driver swerving into the wood in the pitch dark and raping me beneath the sky. He didn?t, and I forgot to tip him. I walked to the fence by the private beach and skipped it, then tiptoed around onto the sand. It was closing time and no one was in the water.
I slipped off my shirt and shorts, balled them up into my high tops, and left them in the sand. The grains were cold and soft, like semolina, and I got into the water slowly. It swallowed me in its darkness and I floated in to honor it, closed my eyes and listened to its familiar sound. Under the water. Under the water, a few miles out, lay ancient ruins, and I pretended to swim down to them, to those sunken subkingdoms and cities of Heracleion and Canopus where I touched the statues? eyes, watched their dead-awake faces. I saw pink granite gods, and a sphinx of Cleopatra?s baba, Ptolemy XII. I saw silverware: I saw pots and pans, bottles and plates, weapons from Napoleon?s sunken 1798 fleet, and a green statue that held something huge in its hand. I couldn?t tell what it was until I swan closer; it wsa a pen. I opened my eyes again. I was just a few yards from the shore, and I saw Fakhr sitting in the sand, his shirtless torso facing the street, waiting for me. I waved, then decided to wade out and get him; he saw me before I was out all the way and came after me.
I swam away from him and he swam faster toward me. I didn?t say hello, he didn?t either, and I stopped stroking the waves when I could no longer reach. I turned around and watched him watch me until he stood in front of me; he could still reach the sandy floor bottom, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. He cupped me in his hands and I kissed his salty mouth, salty with sweat and salt water, and he grew against my bathing suit bottom. I rubbed myself against him then and the waves gently rose and fell, and he bit and licked my neck as I found out again how used to water I was and the wetness inside me rivalled the wetness that surrounded me.


Adèle

By

Leïla Slimani

Xavier talks a lot. Adèle wishes he would hurry up and open the bottle of wine that he?s been holding for the last fifteen minutes. Finally, she gets up and hands him the corkscrew.
This is her favourite moment.
The moment before the first kiss, nudity, intimate caresses. That moment of anticipation when everything is still possible and when she is the mistress of the magic. She greedily drinks a mouthful of wine. A drop trickles over her lips and down her chin and drips on to the collar of her white dress before she can stop it. It?s a detail of the story and she was the one who wrote it. Xavier is jittery and shy. He is not impatient; she is grateful to him for sitting at a distance from her, on that uncomfortable chair. Adèle is on the sofa, her legs folded beneath her. She stares at Xavier with her swamp eyes, viscous and impenetrable.
He moves his mouth toward her and an electric wave runs through her belly. It hits her pussy and explodes it, fleshy and moist, like a peeled fruit. The man?s mouth tastes of wine and cigarillos. Of forests and the Russian countryside. She wants him, and this desire, to her, feels almost like a miracle. She wants it all: him, and his wife, and this affair, and these lies, and the texts they will send, and the secrets and the tears and even the inevitable goodbye. He slips her dress off. His surgeon?s hands, long and bony, barely brush her skin. His gestures are assured, agile, delicious. He seems detached and then suddenly furious, uncontrollable. A strong sense of theatre. Adèle is thrilled. He is so close now that her head starts to spin. She is breathing too hard to think. She is limp, empty, at his mercy.

,br> The Knife

By

Naila Elamin

?the heart one must cut in two perfect halves with a well sharpened knife?
? Davide, the butcher

We will mirror ourselves in the steel.

On one side you -
with that mouth of yours that pouts and stretches around words in a language
I don?t fully comprehend
with that eye of yours reflecting the light transversally like in the Dutch
paintings; bright, flat
with those collar bones arching up as folded wings of a mythical creature,
half man and half bird
with these ears so small they seem sea shells and like sea shells are
most mysterious and round
with that hair that changes colour when wet and has my hand longing
for its lengthening
with that hand on your chest bony fingers extended raising
raising as you breathe in
in, in the thick air

on the other side me -
licking the blade at it?s sharpest point


Joanna II of Naples, daughter of Charles of Durazzo [Charles III of Naples] and Margaret of Durazzo]

By

Zaynab Fawwaz
translated by Marilyn Booth

She was born around 1370 and died in 1435. At a young age she married William, ruler [lit king, but he was duke] of Austria, and was widowed a few years later. She succeeded her brother Ladislaus in 1414 after her husband?s death. There was between her and Count [Pandolfello Alopo] a secret liaison, which she maintained after her husband died without trying to conceal it. She funnelled to this lover the most elevated official missions, and put the welfare of the kingdom in his hands. But finally, her friends persuaded her to remarry. She chose Jacques de Bourlon [James II de Bourbon-La Marche] Count of La Marche, as husband. However, her marrying did not turn out to be a path towards changing her licentious behaviour. When her husband learned of her unfaithfulness, he purged the court of her friends and had her lover publicly beheaded. He sent her away into confinement. Later on, he reconciled with her, or so it seemed. But as soon as she returned to assume her position at court, she concocted a ruse and had her husband imprisoned in one of Naples? fortresses. Only with great difficulty did he finally extract himself, and at that point he left the region entirely and entered a monastery in Bourgogne. And then, the figures who had been close to her began to find ways to return to those lands and exert authority. The history of her reign, over several years, was one of trickery and cunning?..




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