Continuing with the erotic fiction phenomenon said to put the ‘c’ in literature (you’ll get the pun eventually), ex-porn star, Sasha Grey is set to launch her raunchy new read, The Juliette Society. This is not just S&M…this is M&S S&M.
Despite retiring from adult entertainment four years ago, Sasha Grey remains one of the most recognised names in the porn industry. The star of ‘Entourage’, ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ and the somewhat interestingly entitled ‘Throat: A Cautionary Tale’ has put pen to paper for the release of her second book following the success of her first title Neü Sex in 2011. Harking back to the Juliette of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, Sasha Grey’s new novel promises lust, libido, and as much lycra as you can flick a whip at.
The eponymous ‘Juliette Society’ of Grey’s novel is a private club in which only high-flying businessmen, bankers and brokers are admitted to let off a little steam after a week of shouting at incompetents in board meetings. Grey outlines the plot as “set in a highly sexualised world with an assertive female protagonist,” who stumbles across this elitist underworld. From this moment on, Grey’s heroine is able to realise her deepest, darkest fantasies, and brings a whole-new meaning to the term ‘bed-time’ story. Grey describes the society as just like a ‘Fight Club’ for….well, you guessed it.
Grey approaches her past and present work with an artistic earnestness which is remarkable, given the present and prevailing attitudes towards the adult entertainment industry. The actress is known to have changed her surname to that of the titular character in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and certainly takes Oscar Wilde’s advice of yielding to temptation to a whole new level in her novel. Grey claimed that she was “not interested in trying to reinvent the erotic novel” but looked forward to stripping it back to its source as “a salacious treatment of sex, particularly female sexuality, as something mysterious and sensual.”
The Juliette Society is now tipped to be one of the best-sellers 2013, and the next to join the long and illegitimate line of spawned new novels following the craze that saw Fifty Shades of Grey break the record of the most bought book in the history of British literature. The ‘Fifty Shades’ franchise has seen some of the most hilarious merchandising ploys, including a line of baby suits all printed with the slogan, “Generation Grey.” Clandestine Classics has also raunched-up a range of the nation’s favourite novels, such as a homoerotic Sherlock Holmes, a scintillating 2000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a Cathy and Heathcliff that engage in a spot of bondage between spells of aimless moor-wandering. Fortunately, not every renowned writer has had their life’s work picked apart. The author Ruta Sepetys will be either laughing or crying at the enormous rise in the sale of her award-winning ‘Between Shades of Grey’ due to people mistakenly picking up her novel in bookstores. With women from the age of sixteen all the way up to their nineties caught up in this fiction fad and the countless imitators that the novel has generated, the world seems to have gone fifty shades of crazy.