Prayer-Cushion of the Flesh - Softcover

Irwin, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1873982631 ISBN 13: 9781873982631

Publisher: Dedalus Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

Orkhan is released from a lifetime's captivity in the Cage of the Imperial Harem and finds himself hailed by the Harem's concubines as their new Sultan. But flowers of evil flourish in a bed of boredom and, in this novel of bizarre erotic fantasy, Orkhan, who entertains the fantasy that he is indeed the master of his women, enters a maze of perverse relationships masterminded by the devotees of the Prayer-Cushion movement. Temptation, seduction, story-telling and magic are used to lure the Sultan towards a climax which is designed to be simultaneously ecstatic and fatal.
Featuring as it does sex with men, women, fairies and alligators, this strange little book will delight necrophiliacs, masochists, transvestites, eunuchs, ironists and lovers of beauty and ugliness everywhere.

About this title

About the Author:

ROBERT IRWIN, the eminent Arabist, is the author of The Arabian Nightmare, Exquisite Corpse, Dangerous Knowledge, Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh, and The Limits of Vision, also available from Overlook.

From Publishers Weekly:

Sex is theatrical warfare between men and women in British novelist and Middle East scholar Irwin's erotic fantasy set in a Turkish harem. Like a cross between a Fellini movie and The Arabian Nights, this outrageous, often wickedly funny novel spins baroque tales that careen to the outer limits of sexuality. Prince Orkhan, freed at age 20 from the Cage, a prison within Istanbul's imperial harem where he languished for 15 years, assumes the sultan's throne from his dead father and, sex-starved, plunges into his erotic education. His tutors include Anadil, a talkative concubine who teaches him a poetic new sexual vocabulary; Roxelana, a leather-clad animal trainer who likes being whipped to drive out the jinns that possess her; and the washerwoman Perizade, a self-styled phallomancer who tells fortunes by reading the male sex organ. These characters, and others too, are all masquerading as "part of the Harem's spiritual theatre"Aall props designed to spur Orkhan in his psychosexual evolution. With irreverent wit and wild imagination, Irwin's arabesque mocks Western notions of the Orient as a sexual eden, while also turning upside-down conventional "Eastern" themes such as destiny, sex as cosmic union and women's subservience. Irwin's weird hothouse bloom is a philosophic sex comedy, a hypnotic entertainment with a serious underside, though not for the prudish, featuring as it does the erotic secrets of concubines, homosexual giraffes and many episodes of lushly described polysexual carnalities.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dedalus Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1873982631
• ISBN 13: 9781873982631
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 140