Literary Erotica: The Surrender byToni Bentley
About The Book:
Few women do it and even fewer will admit to it. But in Toni Bentley’s daring and intimate memoir, The Surrender, she pulls the sheets back on an erotic experience that’s been forbidden since the Bible and celebrates “the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides.” From Story of O to The Kiss to The Sexual Life of Catherine M., readers have been enthralled with sexually subversive memoirs by women. But even those erotic classics didn’t navigate the psychosexual terrain that Bentley does when she meets a lover who introduces her to a radical and unexpected pleasure, to the “holy” act that she came to see as her awakening.
The Surrender is a witty, intelligent, and eloquent exploration of one woman’s obsession that will be sure to leave readers questioning their own desires.
Bentley is writing of her rhapsodic experience with sodomy. So some will call this memoir blasphemous, others spiritual; some pornographic, others erotic. What it is, is wonderfully smart and sexy and witty and moving, a tale of unbounded passion that leads to transcendence…. While deeply serious, Bentley is also hilarious…. Bentley’s honesty about the most intimate of subjects is daring and delightful for those willing to follow her to, so to speak, the end.
About the Author:
Toni Bentley danced with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet for ten years. She is the author of five books, all named New York Times Notable Books, which include “Winter Season, A Dancer’s Journal,” “Holding On to the Air” (the autobiography of Suzanne Farrell co-authored with Farrell), “Costumes by Karinska,” “Sisters of Salome,” and “The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir.” Her essay, “The Bad Lion” (originally published in the New York Review of Books) was selected by Christopher Hitchens for Best American Essays 2010. She writes frequently for the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Playboy, the Daily Beast, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other publications.
