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Eurydice‘s essays on Literary Arts and Philosophy dating from 1993 to 2019.

• 'f/32 has been called ‘the definitive novel on female sexuality.''  —The Village Voice 
• ‘Eurydice is just the most authoritative and compelling writer of sex in the English language.’   —Craig Marks, Editor-in-Chief, Spin magazine
• ‘Extraordinary and arousing, a book to read between the sheets.’ —Emily Jenkins
• ‘An erudite and astute 'road tour' of the far frontier of state-of-the-art American sexuality.' -Francine Prose
• ‘It’s wonderful to see a woman (Eurydice) not interiorizing male fear of her, especially her body, but rather confronting that fear, fighting it, and celebrating her body and her sexuality by creating a fabulous and funny tale.’  —Kathy Acker
• ‘A unique blend of reportage, memoir, research and incisive analysis. The strength here is that the author does dig up unquestionably fascinating subjects. The book is worth reading–you’ll feel contentedly average afterward.’  —Joel Stein
• 'An honest roll of snapshots of American sexuality. This book empathetically and nonjudgmental conveys us through different worlds, compulsions, and choices, illuminating the spectrum of human extremity.' --William T. Vollmann
• 'Eurydice's subject matter is interesting and timely, as is her thesis that we have conceptualized and controlled the life out of sex. She is genuinely passionate and her thoughts on the sensual nature of faith are strong and beautiful.'  -Mary Gaitskill
• 'f/32 is a highly original narrative, a parable of sorts, disturbing and funny at the same time.' -Robert Coover
• 'A fascinating guide through this dark, foreboding underworld.' -Sudip Bose
• 'f/32 is one of the most daring American novels I have read in years. It is comical, ribald, passionate, visceral, maniac, and wise.Almost any page of f/32 redeems us from the academic writing and banalities we have endured in the past decades of bloodless fiction.' —Fred Tuten
• ‘In true Bildungsroman fashion, Ela’s experience of herself in f/32 develops from one of unconscious fragmentation to completeness in fragmentation. The literary parodies of the Bildungsroman and of notions of essence and absence are necessary components of this novel. For the reaffiliation of the self with the self (as in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando), it is necessary to go over and through history, and to appropriate the self through history’s remarks in literature.’  -Patricia Coleman
• 'Eurydice's fascinating and thought-provoking Satyricon documents the lives of America's sexual transgressors, a cast of naughty, narcissistic and occasionally frightening characters. The line between 'normal' and 'abnormal' isn't blurred, it's obliterated. Primarily, Eurydice manages this by providing historical contexts for seemingly anomalous sexual acts.' —Washington Post
• 'Eurydice elicits sweet nuggets of truth from her interview subjects, exposing the most private, transgressive behaviors. Their delicious confessions not only illuminate the human psyche, they also offer prurient thrills. Her voice delivers unexpected erotic jolts, waves of repulsion, and glimpses of the human sexual soul.' —Village Voice Literary Supplement
• 'Eurydice turns up the heat (to) find furtive groping in the communities where it's most covert and explosive, in the uncomfortably co-ed military and at the Vatican. She talks to cutters and body-piercers, bloodletters, e-mail sex addicts, and vampire sex show performers. However sad or admirable, scary or peculiar, Eurydice's subjects are never boring.'  —New York Observer
• ‘Satyricon USA is a fascinating glimpse into extremely creative sexplay. It can leave you outraged or shaking your head in wonder. And maybe, for some, it will be inspirational.’  —Kevin Dicus, New Frontiers
• ‘Hip without being glib, smart without being smug, Eurydice takes readers on an eye-opening tour of the American sexual underworld and emerges with the news that sexual deviance isn’t deviant at all: it’s deeply embedded in mainstream, middle-class America. In Greek mythology, Eurydice was the unfortunate bride of Orpheus, who tried to lead her out of Hades and failed. As a writer for Spin, this modern-day Eurydice reverses the journey, willingly descending into dank bars and addict meetings. Setting out to discover perversion behind the accepted norm, she finds instead that normalcy abides within such practices as necrophilia, sadomasochism, cybersex and erotic bloodletting. The book also draws strength from Eurydice’s honest confessions about how she feels about what she observes, sustaining a wonderful balance of intellect and emotion throughout her illuminating trek through contemporary sexuality.’   —Publishers Weekly
• ‘Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Eurydice attempts to answer questions like: Why is our society simultaneously obsessed with and afraid of sex? How can this widespread sexual eccentricity coexist with the recent puritanical hysteria about sexual harassment and sex in the military? Are we today more liberated or more confined than in the past? While shedding light on the varied answers to these questions, Eurydice learns that her subjects are not on the fringe of society; they are well educated, middle to upper class professional Americans, whose ‘perversions’ represent a quest for continuity, safety, and uniformity. Rather than acting as a travel guide to the sexual underground, Satyricon USA reveals the normalcy lurking in the dark spaces Eurydice visits. A unique blend of reportage, memoir, extensive research, and incisive analysis, it is a compelling portrait of a nation in the midst of redefining its sexual life.’  -Lambda Publications, The Weekly Voice of LGBTQ
• ‘The author finds most of the contemporary deviant practices she observes to be vaguely pernicious,‘the tricky disguise of our self-denials as sexual excesses.’ Eurydice is suspicious of our rush to define our sexual identities in ever-more-specific terms (butch bottom boy, radical fairy, bigenderist, transbisexual), codifying and policing what ought to be fluid and anarchic. ‘Words and signs are displacing our genitals. Emancipation has brought us no peace,’ Eurydice writes.’  —Regina Marler
• 'On her journeys, Eurydice learns that the people who make up the sexual fringes are, in fact, well-educated middle-class professionals.Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Eurydice probes people's dual lives to answer the fundamental question: Why is our society simultaneously obsessed with and afraid of sex? Daring and ferociously incisive, Eurydice dives into the 'deviant' lifestyle to untangle the contradictions of our modern morality. Eurydice's new book is based on years of reporting and is loaded with serious analysis of modern sexual predilection.' -Time Out
• ‘More outrageous than Erica Jong, more sensational than Nicholson Baker’s Vox, f/32 was Eurydice’s astonishing debut. If Gogol had an irrepressible nose, then Ela (a name meaning orgasm) has a less metaphorical organ which is relentless and defining. It whines, it shrieks, it drives Ela mad. Thanks to ‘it,’ Ela is an urban siren. Then, one day, she loses the instrument of her ‘pleasure,’ and sets out after it on a mock-quest for self-understanding and reunification. f/32 is a wild Rabelaisian romp through most forms of amorous excess, but also a brilliant and apocalyptic tale orbiting around a macabre sexual assault on the streets of Manhattan. Fasten your safety belts for one of the most dazzling rides in recent fiction.’ -Time Out London
• Fiction’s future began with Eurydice’s f/32. Consider its exemplary genesis: Eurydice’s f/32 began when Francois Rabelais, in a moment that Hegel would one day call World Historical, wrote Gogol’s “The Nose.” Kathy Acker plagiarized “The Nose” by Rabelais, but called it “The History of the Eye.” The post-punk rock group The Pixies wrote a song called “Debaser” based upon the assumption that “The History of the Eye” by Kathy Acker was plagiarized from Luis Bunuel’s Chien Andalou. (Like the Mekongs—who wrote “Empire of the Senseless” but claimed never to have read Acker—the Pixies claimed never to have read Acker.) Acker was the opposite of nonplussed. She was plussed. It was thus left to Jacques Lacan to fall asleep while watching Bunuel’s Chien Andalou and listening to the Pixies on AKG holographic headphones, fall asleep in his sleep, double sommeil, and dream of a beautiful Greek woman, Eurydice, born mise en abime on the isle of Lesbos. He dreamt that by the age of eight she had rewritten all the books in her father’s library, incl. Homer, Shakespeare, and Beckett. He dreamt that she ran off to Hollywood at fourteen, planning to live as a guest with other exotic women of distant lands, like Madame Nhu, who find Hollywood congenial. Finally, with Lacan in REM nirvana, all sorrow annihilated, Eurydice wrote f/32.’  ——Curtis White
• ‘From the outset, her work both written and visual has focused on the lives of the marginalized, outsiders by language and culture navigating among dubious when not hostile natives. From the beginning of her writing life, with her novel F32, Eurydice was breaking boundaries by effectively stitching together themes and images in unusual spatial frames so that fragments of high philosophy juxtapose story or explanations of word origins collide with graphic sexuality, such revolts against readerly expectations that would later influence her non-fiction explorations of America’s sexual underground.  Eurydice’s F32 begins with the rape of a young woman by a homeless man.  As a result of the trauma, her violated vagina abandons the body that has been its home since birth.  The story that follows is not a study of rape but a series of picaresque adventures of the wandering vagina named Ela (the Greek word for come), in effect a riff on Gogol’s famous story The Nose.  Philosophical, theological, etymological, and literary, Ela’s adventures in the cosmopolitan world lead eventually back to the damaged body wounded but wiser.  The novel has had a long half-life despite the controversy it wrought at the time it was published. Eurydice’s themes and motifs have evolved and grown still more dialectical than her first achievements, but her obsessions remain the same – the written word invented to illuminate the male gaze that powers the world, especially the world of women.’ 

 —Robert Steiner

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