Okay. I’ll come clean. The four sexiest books I’ve ever read are Kathleen Woodiwiss’s Shanna, a heaving-bosom/swollen-manhood sort of romance novel that my high school boyfriend gave me (which is weird in and of itself); Endless Love by Scott Spencer, a hymn to overheated teenage love; Terry Southern’s Candy; and Nicholson Baker’s Vox, a fine example of literary erotica, especially as it relates to phone sex.

• Read any of these? Share a review or comment!

• Recommend another book for this category!

Other stellar examples of literary erotica include James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, the story of an American college student and his passionate affair with a French shopgirl; Milan Kundera’s very sexy (the political is very personal, it turns out) The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Alec Waugh’s lesbian romp, A Spy in the Family: An Erotic Comedy; D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto.

Erik Tarloff’s The Man Who Wrote the Book is a very funny novel about the troubles an author finds himself in following the publication of his porno best-seller, Every Inch a Lady.

For a collection of all the really “good” parts of novels, try the selection offered in The Literary Companion to Sex: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, edited by Fiona Pitt-Kethley.

If you’re really hot and heavy and want to find some other good books, take a look at those nominated for Britain’s annual Literary Review Best Bad Sex in Fiction award—former nominees and winners include John Updike, Michael Frayn, and Sebastian Faulks (the 1998 winner for Charlotte Gray)—keeping in mind, of course, that one person’s bad sex scene is another person’s pleasurable encounter with prose.