Sex Stories

Sex stories or romantic novels is the name given to fiction that deals with sex or sexual themes, generally is more of a literary or serious way than the fiction seen in pornographic magazines and sometimes including satire or social criticism.

Meanwhile there are substantial quantities of written pornographic works, few of these come near the standards of the best of mainstream literature.

Works of significant literary merit that can be classed as sexstories include:

• Verbal Penetration by Jessica Holter, The Punany Poets
• The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter
• Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Delta of Venus by AnaïNin
• The Story of O by Pauline Rée
• Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Bicycle Rider by Guy Davenport

Taboo sex stories are sometimes marketed as adult erotic stories or vice versa, as "mainstream" romance in recent years has begun to exhibit blatant (if poetic) descriptions of sex.