Written in the 1940s for a private collector and published posthumously, Delta of Venus is  a sequence of linked and loosely connected stories about desire, voyeurism, fantasy, power and sexual performance.

The collection moves through Parisian apartments, artists’ studios, anonymous encounters and elaborate erotic scenarios, deeply invested in appetite. It serves as well as a document of sexual imagination before the vocabulary around gender and sexuality had settled into its contemporary forms. Some stories now read as sharply dated in their language and assumptions, while others remain strikingly fluid in their treatment of bisexuality, gender ambiguity, fetish, secrecy and performance. That friction is part of the book’s interest: erotic literature as both fantasy and cultural evidence.

Penguin Classics, London, 2000. Paperback reprint. Originally published in Great Britain by W. H. Allen & Co., 1978; first Penguin edition 1990. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor edge and corner wear. Pages lightly age-toned with occasional minor spotting; internally clean and binding firm. Very good condition.