A woman gifted a pear that she proceeds to eat as though it is a lover, her arms dripping, “wet all around her mouth.” A pleasure bot with her libido keyed to its highest setting, driven to lick her owner’s shoes and writhe with unconsummated lust until her battery runs out. A man who spends so long masturbating sans lubrication that he starts to worry he’s inflicted permanent nerve damage.
I’ve struggled to find a way to categorize many of this year’s buzziest and most compelling literary reads. What, after all, does Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s saga about estranged brothers, have to do with The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s Booker Prize–shortlisted novel about a disrupted home in the Dutch countryside; or Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, a kaleidoscopic journey into the internet’s influence on relationships; or Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot, the aforementioned android tale?
Well, for one, they are unabashedly and delightfully spicy—making for the kinds of gifts you want to be very, very sure about before presenting to certain family members for the holidays. (Apologies if this flag is reaching you several days too late.)
Much has been made of the disappearance of sex from pop culture. Headlines abound about the supposed prudishness of Gen Z and their disgust for sex scenes in TV and film. In October, my colleagues Rob Arthur and Justin Sayles ran the numbers on 40,000 films and found that, yes: Far fewer flicks are getting freaky these days.
Publishing, on the other hand, seems to have gone the other way, marking what seems like a dramatic increase in sexy plot lines. Literary fiction—specifically the corner of publishing that deals in the highbrow sort of titles that get fawning write-ups in major publications and vie for the most prestigious awards—is hardly a stranger to explicit sexuality. But in recent years, those stories have been linked more with the romance and burgeoning romantasy genres—the latter being a category that fans self-deprecatingly refer to as “fairy smut.” The steaminess in those parts shows few signs of dissipating: 2024 alone saw Maya Kessler’s Rosenfeld, a tale of a woman who begins a tryst with her much older boss when they sneak out of a party to pee in front of each other (the L.A. Times quipped that the book should “come with an X rating”), and House of Flame and Shadow, the latest Sarah J. Maas blockbuster, which appeared in January and was explicitly advertised as sexy. Romantasy aficionados—and it takes only a glance at the New York Times bestseller list to know that there are a whole lot of readers who want their novels with a side of sexy times with various magical beings—wait with bated breath for the next Rebecca Yarros book, whose publication date is just weeks away. An early excerpt teased its “wildly hot sex”—which in romantasy is generally such a guarantee that many readers griped that Maas’s most recent title didn’t pack the heat of her earlier books.
But the amount of lust—and the array of ways in which it’s wielded—in books outside those genres this year is striking, even if the publisher taglines were more reserved. (Miranda July’s All Fours, which also hit the Times’ list and was nearly omnipresent on this month’s best books of the year lists, was coyly described as featuring a “tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist” by publisher Penguin Random House.) Meditations on polyamory—even and especially when the author declines to use any kind of modern naming conventions—abound. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s latest, Long Island Compromise, prominently features a shame fetish and has a title that, it’s eventually revealed, is best not explained in polite company; in Exhibit, R.O. Kwon’s central character embarks on a secret voyage into extramarital BDSM, then admires the results on her body, “florid with big, lush bruises.” The internet and all that it entails, from social media to isolation to, well, OnlyFans (which pops up in some form in Intermezzo, Rejection, and Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which is being adapted by A24 and Apple TV+), are especially prevalent. Indeed, Rejection features a written OnlyFans commission whose extreme length and detail make it very possibly the most magnificently filthy thing I have consumed in all my years of reading: At one point, Tulathimutte’s character requests that upon withdrawing from the nether regions of his partner, “a plume of white smoke should issue thereout like when they announce a new pope.”
(It was inevitable, probably, that the early-web meme-slash-ethos that the internet is for porn would mean that books focused on life on the internet would, yes, feature lots and lots of porn. Rejection and another 2024 book, Jason Pargin’s wickedly funny I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom—which features a forum-addled incel and a cadre of self-appointed Reddit sleuths—are two of the best tomes I’ve encountered this side of Patricia Lockwood about what Online is like these days. Come for the interconnected tales of isolation and/or box of doom; stay for a virtuosic pair of depictions of what a weird, hilarious, toxic, lovely, and fascinating place the modern social internet has become.)
That all these books feature open sexuality is hardly what defines them: All Fours’ exploration of desire outside a loving relationship is a far cry from Annie Bot’s contemplation of sexual agency or The Most’s chafing at midcentury gender mores or Carys Davies’s dance between solitude and connection in Clear. The works vary wildly in tone and subject, and the best of them are a great deal more than the sum of their sexy parts. But acknowledging the spiciest plots and passages therein has functioned like something of a literary secret handshake this year. Did you get to the part with the olives spilled on the floor? The, ahem, “fire-colored pubis”? The tampon …?
What is normal? many of the books seem to ask. Is wanting this acceptable? What about that? The answers vary; for the most part, no real resolution is reached. Maybe it’s a literary backlash to the disappearing lust in other media; maybe our greatest wordsmiths got tired of watching romantasy have all the fun. Or maybe it’s that all that kink simply has got to go somewhere.
It was a year of blushing book clubs. Here’s to another.
