Boston Book Festival 2017

Writing about sex in fiction is notoriously difficult; the UK’s Literary Review even acknowledges this conundrum with their annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award (which, for the record, is the one prize we’re sure none of this year’s BBF authors will win!). But what happens when novelists use sex not just to titillate, but as a jumping-off point to explore issues of gender, freedom, creativity, coming of age, or (gasp) love? Three accomplished novelists will discuss their latest work in a session that’s definitely rated PG-13. Local favorite Tom Perrotta (now a bona fide celebrity thanks to the success of The Leftovers on HBO) pens what’s been called a “coming of middle age” novel with Mrs. Fletcher, about an empty-nester whose online sexual awakening plays out in parallel with her college-aged son’s sexual frustrations. In Made for Love, Alissa Nutting traverses questions of intimacy and definitions of deviance in a quasi-absurdist novel that explores the needs of mind, body, and heart and that the New Yorker calls “a total joyride, dizzying and surprising.” And Daniel Handler, in a novel aptly titled All the Dirty Parts, employs the unapologetically raunchy musings of a sex-crazed high school boy to consider the nature of consent, the fluidity of sexual identity, and the development of empathy. No need to dog-ear the steamy passages here—you won’t want to miss a page of these novels, or a moment of the discussion, moderated by romance novelist and author most recently of Wilde in Love Eloisa James, the nom de plume of Fordham University English professor Mary Bly.