"Erotic", like "comic", means different things to different people - as the cover illustration for this book, a reproduction of a painting from the Louvre called Gabrielle d'Estrees and One of her Sisters, rather neatly demonstrates. Gabrielle, gorgeous creature that she is, sits in her birthday suit - while from outside the frame a chubby hand reaches in and twiddles her nipple, as if trying to tune her in to 98FM. The expression in Gabrielle's eyes is hard to read. Pain? Pleasure? Amusement? Rapture? Female eroticism, as the editors point out in their introduction, is a rainbow reaction of almost infinite variety; and their selection embraces a wide range of emotions and some mighty fine writing, both from mainstream Western writers like Simone de Beauvoir, Kathy Acker and Colette, and from writers whose names were totally new to me, like the Russian Svetlana Boym and Yuan. Ch'iung Ch'iung from Taiwan. Above all, perhaps, from the Lebanese writer and politician Laila Baalabaki, whose "A Spaceship of Tenderness To The Moon" - which was, incidentally, the subject of an investigation by the Lebanese authorities - provides a rare and strikingly vivid glimpse into the relationship between an Arab couple, husband standing stubbornly at the window, wife wishing he'd give in and come to bed. If even one story in an anthology lingers in the mind as this one does, the whole enterprise is surely worthwhile, but here are languorous images galore: Edith Wharton's extraordinary evocation of incest in "My Little Girl" and Simone de Beauvoir's version of Dirty Den in "Marcelle".
