Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012) Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013) 'Maidenhead is a mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild, and Michel Foucault. It's a thrilling, brilliant, and really hot place to be.' Sheila Heti, Globe and Mail
On a mangy beach in Key West, sixteen-year-old Myra meets Elijah, a Tanzanian musician twice her age. Trapped on a Spring Break family vacation, Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive, violent woman with a strange power over him.
When Myra and her splitting-up family return home, she falls in with a pot-smoking anarchist crowd. But when Gayl and Elijah follow her north, she walks willingly into their world, engaging in more and more abject sexual games.
As Myra enters unfamiliar worlds of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl’s self-consciousness.

Maidenhead

Literature & Fiction

Berger, Tamara Faith

Literary

Coach House Books

Two novels, two young women at the frontiers of sex.
Like a series of Penthouse letters penned by Kathy Acker, Lie With Me recounts a woman's sexual escapades, picking up random men in bars for a series of increasingly extreme encounters, hoping to understand love from the far side of sluttiness.
In The Way of the Whore, Mira, an introverted Jewish girl obsessed with Jean Genet, allows herself to be seduced by the sex industry, determined to find meaning in her tormented relationships with cruel men.
Tamara Faith Berger's first two novels have been languishing out of print. They were scandalous when they were first published; substantially revised and returned to print, they're just as titillating and troubling now.
"Treading a line between sublime experimentation and unsettling honesty, Little Cat rides a wave of female sexual energy. . . . 'Please, I want you to stay with me till it's over,' the narrator of 'Lie With Me' begs. With writing this good, it's hard not to.' – Quill &amp; Quire
"Berger's writing is significant, poignant and consciously uncomfortable. Her portrait of female sexuality is daring, original and troubling. Berger's language is crass; this isn't missionary-style 'love-making.' This is dirty, animalistic sex. This is pornography rubbing up against the literary establishment." – Telegraph-Journal
Praise for Tamara Faith Berger's Maidenhead (winner of the 2012 Believer Book Award):
"Myra's confusion, her passion, her need for possession and to be possessed, make this novel an incredible read, finding its place, as Sheila Heti (who should know) wrote, 'somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild and Michel Foucault.'" Flavorwire
"There are no easy moments, no comfort to be found in the searing prose. . . . When writers get young female sexuality right, stories become a revelation and such is the case with Maidenhead. The writing pulls the reader desperately close." Roxane Gay, The Rumpus Tamara Faith Berger was born in Toronto. She wrote porn stories for a living and attempted to make dirty films before publishing her first book, Lie With Me, in 1999. It was made into a film in 2004. In 2001, A Woman Alone at Night was published. Her third book, Maidenhead, won the 2012 Believer Book Award.

Little Cat

It's just another boring summer for our teenaged narrator — until Barbra arrives. An Ethiopian Jew, Barbra was brought to Israel at age five, a part of Operation Solomon, and now our narrator's well-intentioned father has brought her, as a teen, to their home for the summer. But Barbra isn't the docile and grateful orphan they expect, and soon our narrator, terrified of her and drawn to her in equal measure, finds himself immersed in compulsive psychosexual games with her, as she binge-drinks and lies to his family. Things go terribly wrong, and Barbra flees. But seven years later, as our narrator is getting his life back on track, with a new girlfriend and a master's degree in Holocaust Studies underway, Barbra shows up at our narrator's house once again, her "spiritual teacher" in tow, and our narrator finds his politics, and his sanity, back in question.Queen Solomon is another masterful take on the politics of sex, race, and power from the author of the Believer Book Award–winning Maidenhead.

Queen Solomon

United States

Yara

World Literature

The Way of the Whore

Erotica

Gutter Pr

Mira’s sexual awakening is dark, fast, and demeaning  starting with amateur porn, she willingly enters the harsh world of sex work. But Mira soon becomes conflicted: the other girls resent her and the men are rough. As her cousin tries to rescue her, Mira slips deeper and deeper into whoredom. Woman Alone at Night is striking for its intense, authentic evocation of the female sexual psyche. An explicit, intimate read, it's a book with the potential to forever change readers' understanding of sexuality.

A Woman Alone at Night

Soft Skull

Eat ass, pray, love. Twenty-five year-old Yoo-hoo experiences a sexual awakening in her yoga class. She breaks up with her boyfriend and travels to Niagara Falls where she meets a cold-fish teen prostitute and an ex-army troglodyte deep in the falls. Yoo-hoo's unforgettable yogic journey sweeps across the realms of hysteria, asana and enlightenment. Kuntalini is the latest volume in Badlands Unlimited's New Lovers series of short erotic fiction. Inspired by Maurice Girodias' legendary Olympia Press, New Lovers features the raw and uncut writings of authors new to the erotic romance genre. Each story has its own unique take on relationships, intimacy and sex, as well as the complexities that bedevil contemporary life and culture today.

Kuntalini (New Lovers)

Badlands Unlimited

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Books by Berger, Tamara Faith