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    The Sextine Chapel
    The Sextine Chapel
    The Sextine Chapel
    Ebook90 pages43 minutes

    The Sextine Chapel

    By Hervé Le Tellier

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    About this ebook

    The delightful and daring English-language debut of French author Hervé le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the criss-crossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the fresco on the ceiling of a chapel . . .

    Harkening back to another playful book on an intimate subject—Harry Mathews's Singular Pleasures—Hervé le Tellier's The Sextine Chapel celebrates the wonderful, often random, often excruciating possibilities of sexual intimacy, with something here for just about everyone—and their wife, husband, lover, or passing fancy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDalkey Archive Press
    Release dateJul 26, 2011
    ISBN9781564786593
    The Sextine Chapel

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      Book preview

      The Sextine Chapel - Hervé Le Tellier

      Anna and Ben.

      Afterward, Ben opens the curtains. It’s January and already night. The red and blue neon lights of the Holiday Inn on Place de République make Anna’s willowy body turn yellow as she lies on her back, naked on the sheet. He kneels by the edge of the bed, kisses her feet, spreads her thighs, grabs her hips and draws her towards him. Anna closes her eyes. She can’t understand a word of what Ben is saying as he penetrates her and starts his slow to and fro. She feels sorry she took German and Spanish at school.

      Suddenly, she catches the word darling. It sounds so terribly off.

      Ben and Chloe. In a leafy suburb of Houston, Texas, on the double bed belonging to Ben’s parents—whose holiday in Nassau is going just swell, we’ll be back home Monday—he feels his penis stiffen between Chloe’s fingers while she kisses him shyly, then more and more boldly. On television, CNN is showing again and again a terrorist attack that has just occurred in New York. Chloe goes so far as to lick the tip of his penis. Right there, she feels, the skin is as dry and soft as a kitten’s paw. But Ben doesn’t even purr.

      Chloe thinks that if she were a man, she’d be gay. Then, a second later, what an absurd thought that just was.

      Chloe and Dennis. In an ivory Kimberley Clark bathtub, Chloe has crouched down over Dennis, turning her tanned back and short-cropped brown hair towards him, while taking in his phallus (after a deal of wriggling). Once the bathroom floor has been drenched, she decides to pull the plug. So it’s now in an empty tub that she’s rising and descending and groaning with all the requisite energy. Their genitals shunt with a slight sucking sound and, from time to time, air escapes as though from a puncture.

      Dennis has a backache, finds the lighting too bright, and his arms aren’t long enough to reach her breasts and so convince him that he really is with a girl.

      Dennis and Elvire. The ART elevator (for two people, load 180 kilos) is taking Dennis and Elvire up to the seventh floor of their Parisian apartment block (Go up with our friend, Elvire’s husband just told her, Chloe and I’ll take the next one). On the first floor, Dennis kisses Elvire’s nape and strokes her buttocks through her dress. On the third, his hand slips round her hips, raises the cloth, and his fingers slip between the material to touch her belly. On the fifth, his middle finger is inching its way ever deeper between her moist flesh. On the seventh, his finger recedes (regretfully) after a final caress. The door opens, Dennis delicately removes his hand, and they get out. The elevator goes down again at once.

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