Sex and Other Sacred Games - Hardcover

Kim Chernin

4.14

22 ratings by Goodreads

9780812916768: Sex and Other Sacred Games

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081291676X ISBN 13: 9780812916768

Publisher: Times Books, 1989

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Sex and Other Sacred Games is an imaginative look at sexuality, in which a chance encounter in a Paris cafe sets off a parley, a heated discussion, an on-going dialogue, between a feminist and a femme fatale. While following the development of their relationship, the book explores all facets of passion, eroticism, and pleasure. Together, they consider the possibility of women redefining desire. The book consistently raises essential issues regarding our traditional views of sex. The two women challenge us to reconsider the meaning and making of love. They invite us to the sacred game, where sexual identity, pleasure and desire can all be re-discovered or invented from scratch.

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About the Author:

Kim Chernin, Ph.D. has won acclaim for her numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including The Obsession, In My Mother s House (Nominated for Chronicle Critics Award and Chosen as Alice Walker s Favorite Book of the Year in 1983 New York Times), The Flame Bearers (1986 New York Times Notable Book) and National Best Seller The Hungry Self.
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D., is German-born and Paris-educated. She lives and works in the San Francsico Bay area as a counselor, writing coach and provost/mentor in private practice. She is the award-winning author of several non-fiction and fiction books, two of them co-authored with her life-companion Kim Chernin

From Publishers Weekly:

Humorless and overwrought, this discourse on modern female sexuality reads more like a relic from early populist feminist literature than the latest bulletin from the front. Written in alternating chapters by Chernin ( The Hungry Self ) and Stendhal, a German journalist, it wages psychological arguments by telling the story of two women--one American and heterosexual, the other European and gay--who meet in a Paris cafe and explore their sexual identities through dialogue and letters. Chernin and Stendhal try to generate a great deal of heat, intellectual and sensual, through the device of this quasi-fictional, highly rhetorical partnership, but it is not engaging. The American character, "Claire Heller," is self-im portant and self-dramatizing, while her counterpart, "Alma Renau," fares better only because her Teutonic aloofness imposes less gratingly on readers. What passes for feminist thinking between them is only the stalest of sexual woolgathering: "Shall I say we are all, each one of us, in a body we've chosen? The body matches up with us. Everything else is a lie, daydream, mere ambition."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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