Name: Eat Me
Price: 7.99

- $7.99

First published in 1995, Eat Me became an instant international bestseller—and caused a scandal in the US.

Julia is a photographer, Chantal edits a fashion magazine, Helen is a feminist academic and Philippa is a writer. These four friends haunt the cafés of inner-city Sydney, eyeing the passing talent and swapping outlandish tales. Sexy, intelligent, predatory, they are women of their time—but can we believe their wild and wicked descriptions of their erotic exploits?

Linda Jaivin's sizzling debut plays havoc with our ideas of truth, sex and power. With a new introduction by Krissy Kneen, author of Affection and Triptych.

Linda Jaivin is the author of eight books. These include five novels and a novella (Dead Sexy) as well as the collection of essays Confessions of an S&M Virgin, and the China memoir The Monkey and the Dragon. Her 2006 novel The Infernal Optimist was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. In addition, she has published many short stories and essays and has had several plays produced for the stage. She's also a literary and film translator from Chinese, a cultural commentator and public speaker. She likes reading, travel, food and other things. She lives in Sydney. Eat Me was her first novel.

Krissy Kneen is a bookseller and writer. She is the author of Swallow the Sound, Triptych and a memoir, Affection. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and no pets.

www.textclassics.com.au

‘Erotic escapism at its best, with a touch of humour and a touch of class; a blend of fetishism, fun and kiwi fruit!’ New Woman

'It is a delicious, bravura piece of comic and erotic writing, with an opening that will change your view of late-night supermarket shopping forever.' Age

'A high-spirited comedy of manners only thinly veiled as erotica…Jaivin never loses sight of her self-declared goal, which is to wrench the writing of erotica from its male practitioners, dress it up with style and sly humour and restore it to women.' LA Times

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 2 JUN 1997

The exuberant sex scenes in this bestselling work of erotica from Australia demand dog-earing: outrageous and imaginative, they are also graphically convincing. But Jaivin fills the lulls with self-consciously timely dialogue that panders to a hot-button treatment of sexuality and sexual politics. The ensemble cast of four hip women in their 30s tend to talk in sound bites about the beauty myth or the comparative merits in men of brain and brawn. They use words like "empowerment" when trying to decipher the political implications of, say, sticking a cucumber in a man's anus. Chantal is a fashion editor, Julia a freelance photographer, Helen a feminist university lecturer and Philippa a writer of a novel-in-progress called Eat Me. They recount their own sexual adventures and imaginatively entangle themselves in one another's exploits. On their real and fantasy plates they find a 22-year-old musician, a virginal student, a trucker, a Chinese snake charmer, a black gigolo, Rambo, a slave girl and an occasional grape. They are all supposed to be smart, liberated and unrepressed. As for Jaivin, her first novel is much smarter when she throws her characters into bed (or a truck or a supermarket aisle) than when she makes them try to understand the meaning of what they do in any of those venues. This is, really, classic pornography in the 18th-century French manner. It's plain dirty fun that, winking and nodding (and leering), makes a halfhearted show of donning a philosopher's wig. $50,000 ad/promo; foreign rights sold in Germany, Italy, Brazil, Holland, Israel, Spain; author tour.

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