The Naughty Bits

[Musashi Miyamoto]

The Naughty Bits 
The Steamiest (and Most Scandalous Sex Scenes From the World's Great
Books) 
Edited and introduced by Jack Murnighan 
THREE RIVERS; 272 pages; $14 PAPERBACK 

'The Naughty Bits: The Steamiest (and Most Scandalous) Sex Scenes From
the World's Great Books" contains no less than 83 literary quickies,
small gems of all things erotic and lovely, nasty and indecent. 
Culled from the spicy weekly column of Jack Murnighan in nerve.com, the
polite people's pornography site, the book slides readers through
centuries of sexiness in its shocking and salacious 272 pages. Murnighan
has chosen these bits wisely, covering the range of human sexuality with
energetic entries and adding smart, revelatory and cheeky introductions
to the often very small excerpts. By turns, the vignettes titillate,
amuse, arouse, disgust and entertain. 

In those pages, readers will find Melville on Moby's member, Tom Wolfe
on a stud farm, William Kennedy kissing and, not surprisingly, a splash
of self- loving Portnoy, Philip Roth's avatar of onanism. While
Murnighan rounds up the usual suspects -- D.H. Lawrence, de Sade, Henry
Miller and Anais Nin -- he also does a wonderful job of showing modern
prurience has nothing on folks such as Catullus, Petronius, Sappho and
the Middle Ages trio of raunchy Rabelais, lustful Chaucer and bawdy
Boccaccio. 

"The Naughty Bits" isn't meant to be read cover to cover, and is its
most fulfilling when devoured in small doses. Murnighan refuses to shy
away from any topic (as the entries from Joyce and Pynchon show in
detail) and frolics through love and lust of all stripes and angles. 

,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_
HenryMus

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