First published in 1870, Venus in Furs is the novel that gave “masochism” its name.

Severin von Kusiemski enters into an arrangement with Wanda von Dunajew in which desire is formalised. They do so through contracts; then the costumes, humiliation, ownership and fantasy follow. Slowly, they form a machinery through which he attempts to make love absolute, by making himself powerless. It is simultaneously erotic fiction and psychological study, and pretty vicious at looking at what we do to lock ourselves in prisons we build outselves.

This Blast Books edition is awesome (a la my taste), because it includes correspondence between Sacher-Masoch and writer Emilie Mataja, allowing the fantasies of domination and submission in the fiction to bleed awkwardly into biography. The letters illuminate how thoroughly Sacher-Masoch’s literary imagination was entangled with his lived erotic obsessions. Translated from the German by Uwe Moeller and Laura Lindgren, with a foreword by Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer. 

Blast Books, New York, 1989. First edition thus. Paperback. Light shelf wear and handling to covers; internally clean and firmly bound. Very good condition.