Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway
Book Description (Amazon): In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess.
An Education by Lynn Barber
Book Description (Amazon): When Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to precocious experience—an affair with an older man that would change her life.
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Book Description (Amazon): A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.
Belinda by Anne Rice
Book Description (Amazon): From Publishers Weekly - Jeremy Walker, a middle-aged children's book author renowned for his beautiful, old-fashioned illustrations, is captivated by a 16-year-old woman-child who tells him nothing of her past when she moves into his San Francisco home. Obsessed by Belinda's smoky sexuality, the paintings in which he celebrates her beauty are an erotic and sometimes violent extension of Jeremy's books. When the artist discovers that his mysterious lover is the missing daughter of a famed film star, a scandalous story of anger and betrayal uncoils, and Belinda abruptly disappears. To bring her back, Jeremy makes his portraits public, unleashing a media circus and police investigation that conspire to separate them forever.
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan (F)
Book Description (Amazon): Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. But the arrival of her late mother's best friend, Anne, intrudes upon a young girl's pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart...with tragic, unexpected consequences.
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Book Description (Amazon): Meet Holly Golightly - a free spirited, lop-sided [young] romantic girl about town. With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly is a style sensation wherever she goes. Her apartment rocks to Martini-soaked parties and she plays hostess to [much older] millionaires and gangsters alike. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate dream - to find a real life place like Tiffany's that makes her feel at home. Full of sharp wit and exuberant, larger-than-life characters which vividly capture the restless, madcap era of 1940s New York.
Candy by Terry Southern
Book Description (Amazon): Banned upon its initial publication, the now-classic Candy is a romp of a story about the impossibly [young] sweet Candy Christian, a wide-eyed, luscious, all-American girl. Candy –– a satire of Voltaire’s Candide –– chronicles her adventures with mystics, sexual analysts, and everyone she meets when she sets out to experience the world [after high school].
Election by Tom Perrotta (Film)
Book Description (Amazon): Tracy Flick wants to be President of Winwood High. She's one of those ambitious girls who finds time to do it all: edit the yearbook, star in the musical, sleep with her English teacher. But another teacher, staunch idealist Jim McAllister (aka "Mr. M."), thinks the students deserve better. So he persuades Paul Warren--a well-liked, good-hearted jock--to throw in his hat. But that puts Paul's sister, Tammy, in a snit. So she runs, too, on an apathy platform--before starting a real campaign...to get herself kicked out of school.
End of Alice by A.M. HOMES
Book Description (Wikipedia): The child killer – identified only as "Chappy" – who narrates most of the novel, has been in prison for 23 years. Now in his 50s and with a parole hearing approaching, he receives a letter from an unnamed 19-year-old girl who takes a morbid interest in his case. She then begins to relate how she plans on seducing a 12-year-old boy named Matthew who lives in her neighborhood.
During the novel, Chappy makes frequent references to "Alice," his victim, but it is only towards the end of the book that he finally elaborates. Alice was a 12-year-old girl with whom he had a sexual relationship. At the very end of the story, during his parole hearing, we find out the convict brutally murdered and decapitated Alice after she blamed him for her bleeding, which was actually her period (she didn't know what it was). He tried to explain to her what had happened, but she kept threatening to kill him.
Fancy by Robert Krepps
Book Description (Kirkus’ Reviews): Fancy is a bright, beautiful nineteen-year-old who memorizes the Rubaiyat in her spare time . . . when she's not eating enough concoctions to fell a billygoat; or talking. . . Fancy talks in multilingual English, anything from early Katzenjammer to old Duke of York not to mention bad gangster. And she talks a lot when she's not pursuing other activities. She's been the mistress of middle-aged Luther until this lost weekend which occurs somewhere in the roaring twenties and somewhere outside of Pittsburgh.
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Editorial Reviews (Amazon): Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on [Dutch painter Johannes] Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law.
Goethe's Correspondence with a Child by J. Wolfgang Von Goethe
Book Description (The Secret Lives of Great Authors): Goethe's Correspondence with a Child is about a nubile young woman who falls madly in love with an aging poet.
Gossip Girl Series by Cecily von Ziegesar
Book Description (Wikipedia): The series revolves around the lives and romances of the privileged teenagers at the Constance Billard School for Girls, an elite private school in New York City's Upper East Side. The books primarily focus on best friends Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen, whose experiences are among those chronicled by the eponymous gossip blogger. The novel series is based on von Ziegesar's experiences at Nightingale-Bamford School and on what she heard from friends.
History of My Life by Giacomo Casanova
Book Description (Amazon): The name of Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (1725-98), is now synonymous with amorous exploits [with young women], and there are plenty of these, vividly narrated, in his memoirs. But Casanova was not just an energetic lover. In his time he was a diplomat, businessman, trainee priest, traveler, prisoner, magician, confidence man, gambler, professional entertainer, and charlatan. He financed business projects, organized lotteries, wrote opera libretti, and dabbled in high politics. Above all he was an autobiographer of enduring brilliance and subtlety who left behind him what is probably the most remarkable confession ever written.
Hummingbirds by Joshua Gaylord
Book Description (Amazon): In the world of students, popular Dixie Doyle battles to wrest attention away from Liz Warren, who spends her time writing and directing plays based on the Oresteia. In the world of teachers, Leo Binhammer must now share his territory with Ted Hughes, the new English teacher who threatens Binhammer's status as sole owner of the girls' hearts. Seasons change and tensions mount as the students, longing for entry into the adult world, toy with their premature powers of flirtation. The deceptive innocence of adolescence becomes a trap into which flailing teachers fall, as the line between maturity and youth begins to blur.
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Amazon Review (Patrick O'Kelley): In the now-classic novel Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice refreshed the archetypal vampire myth for a late-20th-century audience. The story is ostensibly a simple one: having suffered a tremendous personal loss, an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner named Louis Pointe du Lac descends into an alcoholic stupor. At his emotional nadir, he is confronted by Lestat, a charismatic and powerful vampire who chooses Louis to be his fledgling. The two prey on the innocent, give their "dark gift" to a young girl, and seek out others of their kind (notably the ancient vampire Armand) in Paris.
Innocents by Cathy Coote
Book Description (Amazon): Written when Cathy Coote was nineteen, Innocents is a taut, wickedly clever descent into the anatomy of an obsession, the debut of a precociously assured and provocative young literary voice. Forcing someone vulnerable and naive into a sexual relationship to satisfy a twisted desire is perverted, even evil. But when the perpetrator is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, is she culpable? And if the victim is her thirty-four-year-old teacher, shouldn't he have known better? When the nameless young narrator of Innocents decides to seduce her teacher, she immediately realizes that the power of her sexuality is greater than she ever imagined. She leaves the aunt and uncle who are her guardians and moves in with her teacher; together, they quickly embark on a journey into their darkest desires. Interview with the Vampire Anne Rice
Katie: A Novel by Mo Ibrahim
Product Description (Amazon): Roger, a frustrated New York City public high school teacher and member of Manhattan’s underground pickup artist community, abandons his traditional economics curriculum to teach the art of seduction. With such enticing new material, perhaps his underprivileged students will be more engaged in class, and thereby better behaved—he can only hope that they won’t use their newfound knowledge for evil means. However, when Roger gets into an argument on the subway with the powerful Mr. Miller, who becomes so upset that he sets out to destroy Roger’s teaching career, Roger reluctantly decides to seduce Mr. Miller’s beautiful teenage daughter, Katie, to get revenge. Little does he know that this seduction will have a lasting effect on his life, and the lives of his students.
Lo’s Diary by Pia Pera
Book Description (Amazon): Now, in Pia Pera's controversial new book, Lolita speaks for herself in her own naked voice. Listening to her tale, readers enter a universe in which events, apparently the same as in Nabokov's novel, are radically different. Truths clash, collide, and ultimately diverge. Nabokov's Lolita is not Lolita's story, but her seducer's. The Lolita of that novel is a projection of Humbert's erotic imagination. Lo's Diary tells her story in her own voice, bringing into question the version told by her seducer in his account. Lo's Diary is an investigation into the myth that is Lolita. In Pia Pera's novel, Lolita uncovers her true self and tells us everything Humbert never told, never saw, and never imagined.
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Book Description (Amazon): On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, our unnamed protagonist–an undistinguished journalist and lifelong bachelor–decides to give himself “the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”
The virgin, whom an old madam procures for him, is splendidly young, with the silent power of a sleeping beauty. The night of love blossoms into a transforming year. It is a year in which he relives, in a rush of memories, his lifetime of (paid-for) sexual adventures and experiences a revelation that brings him to the edge of dying–not of old age, but, at long last, of uncorrupted love.
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Book Description (Amazon): On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria – the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport – is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love – and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All: A Novel by Allan Gurganus
Book Description (Amazon): Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Her story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy-striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.
Pretty Little Liars Series by Sara Shepard
Book Description (Wikipedia): Pretty Little Liars is a series of young-adult novels by American author Sara Shepard, beginning with 2006's inaugural entry of the same name. The series follows the lives of four girls – Spencer Hastings, Hanna Marin, Aria Montgomery, and Emily Fields – whose clique falls apart after the disappearance of their leader, Alison DiLaurentis. Three years later, when the girls are juniors in high school, Alison's body is found, and they begin receiving various messages from someone using the alias "A" who threatens to expose their secrets and get revenge.
The novels explore several serious issues such as [age-discrepant student-teacher relationships], bullying, murder, drug addiction, underage drinking, eating disorders, homosexuality [lipstick lesbianism], peer-pressure, infidelity, and mental illness.
Pretty Maids All in a Row by Francis Pollini
Plot Summary: An upper-middle aged high school teacher is seduced by his students, but when they get too attached he murders them.
Pretty Poison by Stephen Geller
Plot Summary: An intelligent, but mentally challenged ex-convict seduces a sexually aggressive high school cheerleader, but the relationship takes a turn after two murders are committed in town.
Shopgirl by Steve Martin
Editorial Reviews (Amazon): Mirabelle works in the glove department of Neiman's, "selling things that nobody buys anymore." Spending her days waiting for customers to appear, Mirabelle "looks like a puppy standing on its hind legs, and the two brown dots of her eyes, set in the china plate of her face, make her seem very cute and noticeable." Lonely and vulnerable, she passes her evenings taking prescription drugs and drawing "dead things," while pursuing an on-off relationship with the hopeless Jeremy, who possesses "a slouch so extreme that he appears to have left his skeleton at home." Then Mr. Ray Porter steps into Mirabelle's life. He is much older, rich, successful, divorced, and selfish, desiring her "without obligation." Complicating the picture is Mirabelle's voracious rival, her fellow Neiman's employee Lisa, who uses sex "for attracting and discarding men."
Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton
Book Description (Amazon): Leonard Schiller is a novelist in his seventies, a second-string but respectable talent who produced only a small handful of books. Heather Wolfe is an attractive graduate student in her twenties. She read Schiller’s novels when she was growing up and they changed her life. When the ambitious Heather decides to write her master’s thesis about Schiller’s work and sets out to meet him—convinced she can bring Schiller back into the literary world’s spotlight—the unexpected consequences of their meeting alter everything in Schiller’s ordered life. What follows is a quasi-romantic friendship and intellectual engagement that investigates the meaning of art, fame, and personal connection.
Teach Me by R.A. Nelson
Plot Summary: Nine’s virginity is taken by Mr. Mann, her new English teacher. They have a sexual relationship until Mr. Mann ends it abruptly and gets married. Nine becomes very bitter and seeks revenge.
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov
Plot Summary (Wikipedia): The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle-aged literature professor Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather. His private nickname for Dolores is Lolita.
The Children by Edith Wharton
Book Description (Amazon): The seven Wheater children, stepbrothers and stepsisters grown weary of being shuttled from parent to parent are eager for their parents' latest reconciliation to last. A chance meeting between the children and the solitary 46-year old Martin Boyne leads to a series of unforgettable encounters.
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
Book Description (New York Review of Books): The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth
Book Description (Amazon): The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college–as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete’s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.
The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov
Book Description (Amazon): The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov's classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with a certain pubescent girl, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
Book Description (Amazon): Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize. In what is arguably his greatest book, America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America’s prisons who became notorious for two reasons: first, for robbing two men in 1976, then killing them in cold blood; and, second, after being tried and convicted, for insisting on dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. [The book contains multiple age-discrepant relationships.]
The It Girl (Series) by Cecily von Ziegesar
Book Description (Amazon): Jenny Humphrey is leaving Constance Billard School for Girls to attend Waverly Academy, an elite boarding school in New York horse country where glamorous rich kids don't let the rules get in the way of an excellent time. Jenny’s determined to leave her crazy Manhattan past behind and become a sophisticated goddess on campus. But first she'll have to contend with her self-absorbed roommates, Callie Vernon and Brett Messerschmidt. Hot guys, [hot teachers], intrigue, and gossip all add up to more trouble than ever for Jenny.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Book Description (Amazon): Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras' childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare, yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.
The Nice Old Man and the Little Girl by Italo Svevo
Book Description (Amazon): The fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is a distillation of Italo Svevo's concerns--attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience versus social convention, and the cost of sexual desire. This novella is a marvel of psychological insight, following the man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications to their tragic-comic end.
The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy
Book Description (Amazon): Honey Flood (if that’s her real name) arrives in London with only her quick wits and a scheme. To get what she wants, she’ll have to seduce the city’s brightest literary star, no matter how many would-be bohemians she has to charm, how many smoky jazz clubs she has to brave, or how many Lady Something-Somethings she has to humor. But with success within her reach, Honey finds that in making the SoHo scene, she’s made a big mistake.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks (F)
Plot Summary (Wikipedia): In 1930s Edinburgh, sixteen-year-old girls, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, Monica, and Eunice are assigned Miss Jean Brodie, who describes herself as being 'in her prime', as their teacher. Miss Brodie, determined that they shall receive an education in the original sense of the Latin verb educere, "to lead out", gives her students lessons about her personal love life and travels, promoting art history, classical studies, and fascism. Under her mentorship, these six girls whom Brodie singles out as the elite group among her students—known as the "Brodie set"—begin to stand out from the rest of the school.
[Examples of age-discrepant relationships: One day when the approximately twelve-year-old Sandy visited Mr Lloyd, the married with six children art master, he kissed her. Miss Brodie was obsessed with the notion that Rose, who was approximately sixteen-years-old and the most beautiful of the Brodie girls, should have an affair with Mr Lloyd.]
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
Book Description (Amazon): All the world's a stage--and nowhere is that more true than at an all-girls high school, particularly one where a scandal has just erupted. A teacher has had an affair with his underage student, and though her friends pretend to be dismayed, they are secretly curious and jealous. They obsessively examine the details of the affair under the watchful eye of their stern and enigmatic saxophone teacher, whose focus may not be as strictly on their upcoming recital as she implies.
The Shadow of the Sun by A.S. Byatt
Review (Complete Review): Anna is the daughter of the renowned novelist Henry: he's her "distant and largely unknown father", and she does suffer some from being in his shadow. She got herself kicked out of school -- for running away without telling anyone -- but over the course of the novel gets her act together a bit and does finally win a place at Cambridge.
The second part sees Anna at Cambridge... Here matters are complicated when Oliver [a married friend of the family] again appears, and this time their relationship turns into a sexual (and not-quite-romantic) one.
The Uses of Enchantment: A Novel by Heidi Julavits
Book Description (Amazon): One Autumn day in 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal vanishes from her Massachusetts prep school. A few weeks later she reappears unharmed and with little memory of what happened to her--or at least little that she is willing to share. Was Mary abducted, or did she fake her disappearance? This question haunts Mary's family, her psychologist, even Mary herself. Weaving together three narratives, The Uses of Enchantment conjures a spell in which the hallucinatory power of a young woman’s sexuality, and her desire to wield it, has devastating consequences for all involved.
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
Book Description (Amazon): Once an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France, now Lestat is a rockstar in the demonic, shimmering 1980s. He rushes through the centuries in search of others like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his terrifying existence.
The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners for Use in Educational Establishments by Pierre Louys
Book Description (Wakefield Press): The first of Pierre Louÿs’s erotic works to see publication after his death, The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners is also his most outrageous, and one of the few erotic classics in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice and a periodic format, Louÿs turns late nineteenth-century manners roundly upon their head, with ass prominently skyward.
Towelhead by Alicia Erian
Book Description (Amazon): When Jasira's mother finds out what has been going on between her boyfriend and her thirteen-year-old daughter, she has to make a choice -- and chooses to send Jasira off to Houston Texas, to live with her father. A remote disciplinarian prone to explosive rages, Jasira's father is unable to show his daughter the love she craves -- and far less able to handle her feelings about her changing body.
Bewildered by extremes of parental scrutiny and neglect, Jasira begins to look elsewhere for affection. Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait, and high school has become a lonely place for a "towelhead." When her father meets, and forbids her to see, her boyfriend, it becomes lonelier still. But there is always Mr. Vuoso -- a neighboring army reservist whose son Jasira babysits.
You Must Remember This by Joyce Carol Oates
Book Description (Amazon): Joyce Carol Oates's epic novel of an American family in the 1950's probes the tender division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working-class town in upstate New York, this book chronicles the frustrating marriage of parents Lyle and Hannah; the idealistic political journey of son Warren, and the passionate, obsessive relationship that develops between 15-year-old Enid Maria and her uncle Felix, a professional boxer twice her age.
