Author Lisa Hilton's top five picks of erotic art
From writing historical biographies and novels, British author, Lisa Hilton's foray into erotic thrillers was almost a rite of passage with Maestra, the first in the trilogy. "No one wanted Maestra and I couldn't give it away and when I say couldn't give it away, I mean that literally. My ex-agent hated it; she said it was disgusting and she didn't want anything to do with it. My regular publisher, I offered it to him for no money and he still didn't want it. I couldn't even give it to him as a present," says Hilton. After having sold over a million copies and motion picture rights to the book, she was in the country recently to promote her second book in the series, Domina.
Hilton's world is rife with a heady cocktail of murder and sex served up in an artful orgy of celebrity lifestyle porn. Despite Maestra's success, the author doesn't want to disappoint by writing the same book again.
"A lot of series tend to be quite repetitive and because I conceived it as one story, I wanted Judith Rashleigh, (her heroine) to really evolve and develop and also to continue to surprise." And surprise she does, with this fast paced, glamorous book that aims to transport you.
Here are her top five picks of erotic art. For more on the author and the genre she has come to dominate, find her on the cover of India Today Spice, on stands, June 30, 2017.
Favourites in erotica
Venus of Urbino, a 1538 oil painting by the Italian master Titian; it depicts a nude young woman, identified with the goddess Venus, reclining on a couch in the sumptuous surroundings of a Renaissance palace.
Histoire D'O (Story of O) is an erotic novel published in 1954 by French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage, and published in French by Jean-Jacques Pauvert.
Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) is a French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782.
Le boucher is a book by Alina Reyes, a French writer, best known for her literary treatment of eroticism.
In Praise of the Stepmother, an erotic novel by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.
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