Books

A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent anti-government rebellion.

Polyandry—one or more males moving in and sharing the wife’s bed with her husband’s consent in exchange for money or labor—was common among the impoverished in Imperial China, though illegal, and the polyandrous Yan family in rural Shaanxi Province take in two...

“An impassioned, thought-provoking manifesto” (Kirkus Reviews) on the mass surveillance of erotic intimacy.

At present the USA is the global innovator in sexual repression, with almost one million Americans under electronic surveillance, many rendered unemployable and indigent for offenses as minor as frat-party mooning or streaking, consensual...

Want to know what’s really going on with relationships in China today? It is the Shanghai of courtesans and concubines, danger and decadence, updated to 2020. American expat author Isham Cook has disappeared. His last known history is chronicled by an exotic woman who seems right out of 1930s Shanghai herself, Marguerite, a mustachioed...

Have foreigners shaped China’s history to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged, reaching back possibly millennia? Was Confucius’ most famous book, the Analects, inspired by entheogenic medicines imported from abroad, possession of which in the 1930s brought one before the firing squad in the name of Confucius? In these book...

Jeff Malmquist is unaccountably catapulted to the year 2060. He finds himself in New Gary, Indiana, a labor camp of one million Chicagoans, their identities hacked and incriminated as pedophiles through the collusion of a corrupt US Government, the Russian cybermafia, and China. He escapes to Chicago, only to find himself in a full-scale replica...

What do seashells, obesity, graffiti, and the American ghetto have in common? Nude hot springs and the Japanese theater? Atheists and family-values conservatives? Why do atheists go on religious pilgrimages? How have schools infantilized our understanding of Shakespeare, and the textbook industry conspired to turn our language’s history into...

It’s 1949 at Revolutionary University. Chinese students spend all their waking hours in political meetings—when they’re not hauling feces from the latrines to the manure fields.

Jump to 2015. Chinese endure endless meetings at the hands of bosses and are required to keep their cellphones on around the clock and pick up at once—or be fined. They...

There is no more schizophrenic pastime than the application of oil to flesh. Whether as bodily relief and relaxation, a means of seduction, or a form of prostitution, massage has long both fascinated and repelled. But what if these contradictory aspects of the practice—the therapeutic and the erotic—were seen as inseparable and integral to it?

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A foreign teacher struggles with proper whipping technique on his female student, while another gives his student a mysterious substance known as LSD. In other stories, a sex robot rapes its owner, a female professor trolls cafés minus her underwear, a store clerk softens up a stingy customer with his fist, and a foreigner comprehends all too...

Expat Isham Cook lives a highly ordered life of the mind and is not one to be swayed by circumstance, until his dispassionate existence is tripped up by Cookie, an elusive woman glimpsed around his gritty Beijing neighborhood. He then becomes captivated by the flamboyant eroticism of a woman on the subway, Luna, who radically overhauls his most...