This article appears in the March '17 issue of Esquire.

Sex in fiction, like sex on a beach, ought to be a no-brainer. On the one hand, there's, well, sex, a source of mystifying pleasure and profundity that for most people rarely elicits any articulation other than a contented grunt, groan, or gasp. On the other hand, there's the novel, an artistic enterprise devoted to making verbal sense of mute experience. In theory, the setup seems the perfect illustration of the Reese's principle: two great tastes that taste great together.

But theory is not practice, and life, friends, is not a peanut-butter cup. We all recognize that the boy who develops certain notions about the compatibility of sand and skin from the swimsuit issues stacked next to his grandfather's BarcaLounger must soon discover the rough reality of forty-grit lovemaking. A similar lesson awaits the young litterateur who insists that a good book should move not only the head and the heart but also the loins. Not for long will he be able to avoid an abrasive encounter with this sort of thing:

"She raised one foot onto the sink and held the doorknob to her mouth, warming and wetting it with her breathing. She parted the lips of her pussy and pressed there, gentle at first, then less so, starting to spin the knob. She felt the first wave of something good go through her, and her legs weakened. . . . Then she re-wet the knob with her tongue and found its place between her lips again, pressing tiny circles against her clit, then just tapping it there, liking how the warm metal began to stick to her skin, to pull at it a little each time."

Everett Collection

That hackneyed little hymn to domestic ingenuity comes from Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am, published this past fall. If the judges of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award are to be trusted, it was not the most flagrant example of writing in flagrante to appear in 2016. (The Italian novelist Erri De Luca scooped up that honor, for a new translation of The Day Before Happiness: "She opened her legs, pulled up her dress and, holding my hips over her, pushed my prick against her opening. I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.")

Once upon a time, of course, even bad fictional sex had a rough-and-ready social purpose. Not a few leather-bound classics stood prepared, if we may borrow a metaphor, to offer a doorknob to the lonely, the frustrated, and those in the throes of desperate inexperience. But today, what chance does Delta of Venus or Lady Chatterley's Lover stand against the HD pornorama we keep pouched within inches of our groin, the palm-sized box of wonders that would make a shah blush with modesty?

There are so many perils awaiting sex in serious fiction these days that you could almost forgive a writer for playing it safe and sticking to the merely suggestive. Almost, that is, until you remember that prudence, no less than prudery, is the enemy of art. (Consider this your obligatory reminder that Ulysses, the preeminent anglophone novel of the twentieth century, takes place on a date that commemorates the first handjob James Joyce ever received from his future wife.)

All credit, then, goes to the following twelve writers, who press forward in spite of the sniggering. And a special shout-out to those whose devotion to literature has not rendered them too stingy to flirt with their readers, to seduce them—in the end, even, to try to turn them on.

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

Obviously Portnoy's Complaint is the easy choice here. But Roth connoisseurs know that Sabbath's Theater is where the real action is. The novel opens not long before Mickey Sabbath, a sixty-year-old puppeteer, loses his Yugoslav lover, Drenka Balich, to a pulmonary embolism. The book is Roth's great song of rage: rage at life, rage at death, rage at the mores that get Sabbath fired from his college teaching job after he has phone sex with an undergrad. (A footnoted transcript of the call goes on for twenty-one pages.) Self-aware enough to diagnose itself as "the discredited male polemic's last gasp," Sabbath's Theater is also furious enough to keep up the fight.

"Even dead, Drenka gave him a hard-on; alive or dead, Drenka made him twenty again. Even with temperatures below zero, he would grow hard whenever, from her coffin, she enticed him like this. He had learned to stand with his back to the north so that the icy wind did not blow directly on his dick but still he had to remove one of his gloves to jerk off successfully, and sometimes the gloveless hand would get so cold that he would have to put that glove back on and switch to the other hand. He came on her grave many nights."

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

Make Degradation Sexy Again—or Bad Behavior, as the cover has it—proves that Gaitskill is still our foremost literary authority on whips, bondage, and sadomasochism. Her landmark collection resists facile sermons and cartoonish kink. Her men are brutal and unredeemable, her women hell-bent on absolution through annihilation. If that setup leaves you craving a walk on the (very) wild side, we hope the dungeon masters and dominatrixes you encounter aren't half as cruel as Gaitskill's.

"I shouldn't be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. For a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her."

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

In What Belongs to You, the narrator reminisces about an early sexual encounter: As a youth, he was forced to watch a boy he loved fool around with a girlfriend. The narrator, hurt but aroused, recalls the "combination of exclusion and desire I felt in his room, beneath the pain of exclusion the satisfaction of desire." Sometimes, he says, "I think it's the only thing I've sought." Now teaching in Bulgaria, the young American finds the exclusion and desire he was looking for in Mitko, an endearing hustler he pays for sex. Their relationship ultimately reveals "how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat."

"There wasn't a lock on the door, we could have been interrupted, and maybe the risk heightened my pleasure as Mitko pressed his whole length against me, placing his feet beside mine and leaning his torso into my spine, his breath hot on my neck. This was reality, I felt with a strange relief, this was where I belonged."

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

When George Plimpton and his circle of rich young American expatriates founded The Paris Review, in 1953, Salter was still a fighter pilot in the Air Force. But his third novel, published fourteen years later, reads like the ultimate erotic fantasia of Plimpton's louche postwar set. The book's hero, a Yale dropout in possession of nothing but a convertible that he may not even own, seduces a young woman in a small town in central France. After a slow start, the narrative follows their affair in terms explicit enough to still count as startling.

"He is determined to perform the most gentle act, but he doesn't know exactly where to enter. He tries to find it. 'Plus haut,' she whispers. His arms are trembling. Suddenly he feels her flesh give way and then, deliciously, the muscle close about him. He tries not to press against anything, to go in straight. She is breathing quickly, and as he withdraws on the first stroke he can feel her jerking with pleasure. It's the short movements she likes. She thrusts herself against him. Moans escape her. Dean comes—it's like a hemorrhage—and afterwards she clasps him tightly."

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

Keats longed for a brighter word than bright; Written on the Body calls for a more luscious word than lush. This revelatory crossbreed of prose poem, erotic ode, and philosophical text unspools like silk and offers surprises at every turn. What begins as the story of an affair—the gender-ambiguous narrator falls for a dying married woman—hurtles into an arousing dreamscape of exaltation and loss.

"She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing."

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

Here come the sexy bits." By design, Amis's debut novel is a comedy about late adolescence, not a humid sump of literary erotica. But when Charles Highway finally wins the good graces of Rachel, whom he's been lusting after for a hundred-plus pages, he's kind enough to warn us about what is soon, ahem, to come. "How nice to be able to say: 'We made love, and slept.' Only it wasn't like that; it didn't happen that way." What we get instead is "an insane, grueling, blow-by-blow obstacle course" narrated by the hyperarticulate Highway in pore-revealing prose that culminates, no joke, in a T. S. Eliot–assisted climax.

"Move my hand over her bronze tights, tracing her hip-bone, circling beneath the overhang of her buttock, shimmer flat-palmed down the back of her legs, U-turning over the knee, meander up her thighs, now dipping between them for a breathless moment, now skirting cheekily round the side. It hovers for a full quarter of a minute, then lands, soft but firm, on her cunt."

"Lust" by Susan Minot

Minot's 1984 short story chronicles the coming of age of a boarding-school coed. Boys and girls in thrall to heady new hormones make out in empty swimming pools, in cars, on couches, and at parties. As Minot's searing vignettes roll through and across the decades—the rockabilly jives of the fifties, the camping trysts of the seventies, the strobe-lit fraternity bacchanals of the eighties—they form a tableau that can feel timeless. But in an era of murky sexual politics, this gutting deconstruction of what is politely called "young love," in which each affair hurts more than the last, has never felt more contemporary.

"In bed, I didn't dare look at him. I lay back with my eyes closed, luxuriating because he knew all sorts of expert angles, his hands never fumbling, going over my whole body, pressing the hair up and off the back of my head, giving an extra hip shove, as if to say There."

G. by John Berger

This extraordinary novel, a retelling of the Don Juan story, follows a rake's progress through Europe on the eve of the First World War. Written by the British art critic, essayist, and novelist Berger, who recently died at ninety, it's shot through with rich visual language, ominous invocations of the social and political forces about to tear the world apart, and erudite meditations on the nature of love, sex, and desire. Oh, and a few crude drawings of penises.

"He has convinced her that the penis twitching in the air above her face is the size and color and warmth that it is entirely because of what he has recognized in her. When he enters her, when this throbbing, cyclamen-headed, silken, apoplectic fifth limb of his reaches as near to her center as her pelvis will allow, he, in it, will be returning, she believes, to the origins of his desire. The taste of his foreskin and of a single tear of transparent first sperm which has broken over the cyclamen head making its surface even softer to the touch than before, is the taste of herself made flesh in another. This can never stop, she whispers, slowly and calmly."

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Set against the backdrop of the Prague Spring, The Unbearable Lightness of Being examines the relationships of four flawed, capricious lovers. Sex, adultery, and intimacy appear in terms both romantic and realistic. In one instance, you're awaiting an impending orgasm during a character's ill-advised tryst with a stranger. In another, you're contemplating the mechanisms of sewage systems as she takes refuge in the nearest bathroom. The pain and beauty she and the other characters encounter offer a master class in sensual metaphysics, one that stimulates more than just the physical senses.

"The reason she refused to get down on all fours was that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe her from a distance of several feet. She hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him. That is why, looking him straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug was fairly dripping with it."

Couples by John Updike

David Foster Wallace once quoted a friend who'd described Updike as a "penis with a thesaurus." And fair enough. But when you're searching for a story of sexual indulgence, is a thesaurus really so unwelcome? Cue Couples, Updike's tale of confession, lust, and melodrama within a circle of scandalously adventurous friends in small-town Massachusetts. Written soon after the advent of birth control, it offers an enthralling celebration of the sexual revolution.

"She crouched and whimpered above him, her nipples teasing his lips. She went down on him purring; she was a minx. This was new, this quality of prostitution, of her frankly servicing him, and taking her own pleasure as a subdivision of his. Her slick firm body was shameless yet did not reveal, as her more virginal intercourse once had done, the inner petals drenched in helpless nectar."

Endless Love by Scott Spencer

Spencer's hypnotic novel—not to be confused with the two sappy screen adaptations by directors who clearly stopped reading after the title—insists that the sort of love that knows no bounds is the most dangerous of all. Two doomed young lovers share sex so intense it borders on the surreal, culminating in a marathon fueled by grief, mania, and menstrual blood.

"Her muscles were rigid and she held her breath. Ribcage turned into two parallel rollercoaster tracks. Rump puckered. You're not supposed to hold your breath when you have an orgasm. Jade learned that in a book and taught it to me. 'You're living, not dying,' she said, then."

House of Holes by Nicholson Baker

The House of Holes is a lot like Westworld: a landscape staged by an enigmatic genius and designed to fulfill your nethermost desires, where few rules apply and the customer is always right. In the House of Holes, you can have sex with anything you'd like (other humans; unripened bananas; sentient, stand-alone arms; screwdrivers; a tree; a "pornmonster" with one hundred penises). Every man is hung like a Clydesdale, every woman has oxbow curves, and everyone—everyone—is primed to shag. At first you might think that Baker—celebrated author and seemingly well-adjusted family man—has been the victim of identity theft at the hands of a thirteen-year-old horndog. Then you realize only a mind like his could come up with so many synonyms for human genitalia. House of Holes isn't arousing, but who says sex always has to be sexy? Sometimes it can just be fun.

"Jerk after jerk of Jason's artisanal come filled her rejoicing twathole. 'Now quick, hop on this cockbranch.' She grabbed it and held it—it was still warm from its accelerated growing. And then she heard the summer wind begin—a warm wind that made a different kind of rustling in the leaves because the leaves were drier now—and the light that snuck in between the boughs and boles was splaying and scattering, half of it reflected off the water, hailed direct from the setting sun. 'Fuck me deep, tall, strong penis tree,' she said."