Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Sex

April 2012

If love makes the world go ’round, sex is what keeps it spinning, and this month we’re reeling with writing on this most universal of themes. In these stories sex is both subject and object, cause and effect. See how Fatima al-Ali, Nadine Bismuth, Rubem Fonseca, Mar Gómez Glez, Eduardo Halfon, Fernando Iwasaki, Hanoch Levin, Giulio Mozzi, Felix Palma, Adrian Sangeorzan, Care Santos, and Sebastiano Vassalli address the facts (and fictions) of life. We trust you’ll be seduced.

Beyond this Darkness and this Silence

The majority of women can’t bear the idea of sleeping with someone they can’t see.

Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

Multilingual

Tana

By Giulio Mozzi

The tongues of flesh were captivating as they rose and fell, row by row, like a wave, the wings moving only slightly.

Translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris

Multilingual

To Troy, Helen

By Fernando Iwasaki

She had undressed me then as if she were peeling a piece of fruit.

Translated from Spanish by Jeremy Osner

Multilingual

The Hunchback and Botticelli’s Venus

By Rubem Fonseca

A hunchback either becomes impotent or burns in a fire of lasciviousness that never cools for a single instant, like the heat of hell.

Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers

Multilingual

The Ringing Body

By Fatima Yousef al-Ali

I’m passionately in love with your voice . . . only your voice.

Translated from Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins

Horst

By Sebastiano Vassalli

I am a thief of strong emotions. I listen to the moans and shouts of others.

Translated from Italian by Gregory Conti

Good Women and Bad Women

By Eduardo Halfon

I want to know where you got this filth.

Translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn

Multilingual

The Bicycle Factory

By Adrian Sângeorzan

What was better: to lie in the ground with a uterus or to live above it without one?

Translated from Romanian by Jean Harris

The Sex Life of the Writer

By Nadine Bismuth

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates.

Translated from French by Alison Strayer

Multilingual

Meow

By Félix J. Palma

With even more refined manners I propose she sticks a ballpoint up the cat’s rectum.

Translated from Spanish by Nick Caistor & Amanda Hopkinson

Multilingual

Review

By Hanoch Levin

They plumb in crude terms the physical attributes of her desired but unobtainable physique.

Translated from Hebrew by Atar Hadari

The Schoolyard

By Mar Gómez Glez

I was three and he was four.

Translated from Spanish by Sarah Thomas

Multilingual