An astonishing look at the dark side of the soul from the author of The Care of the Soul and Soulmates.

    Hasegawa's work really is quite unique - like Tom of Finland, he has given the gay male world more classic iconic images which though thoroughly Japanese have become truly international. His work is both incredibly sexy and an amazing hybrid -- influenced by major world cultures.

    Fresh from the strict but loving care of her headmistress at boarding school, Dorothea returns home to find an impassioned lover eager to school her further in the delights of the flesh.

    Thirty-one writers express the diversity of erotic experience in prose and poetry that is both sensual and political.

    

    The door to the Mistress' office leads to much more than an afternoon of punishment to the crack of a birch rod. Like its contemporaries A Man With a Maid, Beatrice and My Secret Life, Miriam takes its place at the forefront of Victorian underground literature.

    No one wrote erotica better than the Victorians. Classic celebrations of the senses like Fanny Hill, The Way of a Man with a Maid, My Secret Life and Venus in Furs just flowed from their pens. The most celebrated erotic journal of the Victorian era was the justly famous, The Pearl (available from Renaissance E Books), whose once banned pages introduced many an erotic masterpiece to the world. The Pearl's fame is rivaled only by that of its successor. For, according to the apparently authoritative and comprehensive Introduction by Antoinette Hillman-Straus, when The Pearl went out of business, a new publication rose to fill the gap, The Oyster. Displaying a totally uninhibited and delightfully erotic style, the Oyster was written anonymously and privately distributed. The Oyster was largely forgotten until an obscure edition was rediscovered in the 1980s, in the wake of the success of revived editions of The Pearl. Like its predecessor, the revive Oyster went on to become a bestseller in our time, a classic work whose style and descriptions are so frank they still have the power to shock and compel 21st century readers.

    

    Eroticism and exoticism are the predominant characteristics in Uwe Ommer's photographs - photographs which address an insatiable desire for joie de vivre and enjoyment of life.