Two strangers, Jim and Abby, meet through a telephone sex line and move into a private conversation neither wants to end.

The entire novel unfolds through their voices as flirtation becomes confession, fantasy and a strange form of intimacy, with each testing how much can be revealed to someone they cannot see and may never meet.

Baker turns an explicitly erotic premise into a formally precise study of language, attention and desire. Without conventional narration, bodies must be constructed entirely through speech: pauses, jokes, evasions and increasingly elaborate stories. The result is simultaneously funny, tender and voyeuristic, interested as much in how strangers invent one another as in sex itself.

Published in 1992, Vox became a New York Times bestseller and one of the decade’s most notorious literary novels. It gained another layer of cultural infamy when Monica Lewinsky’s purchase of the book emerged during the investigation into her relationship with Bill Clinton, permanently linking Baker’s telephone fantasy to the politics and sexual anxieties of the 1990s.

Vintage Contemporaries edition. Paperback. Very good condition with light cover and edge wear.