What's on Camille Sojit Pejcha's Bedside Table?
Camille Sojit Pejcha is a writer and editor covering sex, culture, and desire. Before launching Pleasure-Seeking, she served as Features Director and columnist at the independent magazine Document Journal. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Slate, W, and other leading outlets.
You can read our previous bedside table series entries here:
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Animal by Lisa Taddeo
Olivia Wilde called this book “So insanely good and true and twisted it’ll make your teeth sweat,” and she was right—even though I really don’t know what that means! Generational trauma, gender animosity, and psychosexual undertones coalesce in this stunning sophomore novel from Lisa Taddeo. Her first book Three Women was a portrait of female desire; Animal is an indictment of the culture that shapes it. A surreal fever dream of a book.
Want by Gillian Anderson
Like dreams, our fantasies are a window into the subconscious: a parallel universe that’s not beholden to the rules of our everyday reality—and similarly, they’re open to interpretation. This is the topic of Want, a compilation of anonymously-submitted sexual fantasies from women around the world curated by none other than Gillian Anderson. (Yes, that Gillian anderson. Could she get any hotter?)
Bunny by Mona Awad
This book took me places I wouldn’t go with a gun. Next question!
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
Miranda July’s debut novel has lived rent-free in my head since I first read it in 2015. I felt compelled to reread it after devouring All Fours, and am now convinced I discovered an Easter Egg—or perhaps just the seed of an idea—in the form of this quote:
“Given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk—always on all fours, always prone, always there for you.”
Miranda’s work makes me feel less alone in the world by reminding me that the inner worlds of others—and the human experience in general—is pretty fucking weird. The way she deftly handles themes of dominance, submission, disgust, and arousal in this book permanently altered my brain chemistry and changed the way I think about desire.
If you liked The Substance, you’ll love Aesthetica. In the age of Facetune and migrating filler, Rowbottom chronicles the quest for self-actualization through body modification. Thinking about the character’s attempt to cultivate confidence and self-worth by appealing to patriarchal power—and then reverse the negative effects of her choices and regain her “true” self through yet another procedure—I’m reminded of something Jessica DeFino said during our podcast episode: “The beauty industry conflates the self with the surface, and the imagined future self as the true self and the real self. It’s very smart of the beauty industry to rebrand the manipulation of the surface as the human quest for the self, because we really can’t deprogram that urge within us.”
Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman
This book has been on my bedside table for the better part of two years because my boyfriend and I started reading it out loud to each other, thinking it would be sexy, only to discover that we both kind of hate the book and its characters. We don’t have the heart to stop reading it, nor are we particularly motivated to do it often, so it sits here mocking us. I couldn’t put my finger on what bothered me about it until I read this excellent piece by Noor Qasim for The Drift, which calls it out as an example of the “bisexual millennial sex novel”—a burgeoning genre that circles around themes of queerness, heteropessimism, and desire, even as it struggles to figure out what it’s trying to say.
Vintage Playboy
At risk of becoming a parody of myself, I picked up this vintage issue of Playboy at a thrift shop and can’t get enough. This one’s a holiday issue, and it’s a stacked lineup of thinkers—from Marshall McLuhan to Alan Watts, Arthur Miller, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and Arthur C. Clarke.
Reading this really radicalized me because before I started delving into the archives, I assumed men’s magazines were all about the centerfold. Now I’m pissed that the women’s magazines I read growing up were doling out absurd sex tips, while the articles in men’s magazines were dedicated to pondering the mind-body problem. What the fuck!
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Playboy back in the day famously paid the highest word rate for contributors' articles and stories. It was how Hefner gained respectability to go along with being a dirty magazine. As a result they published some amazing stuff.
A fellow vintage Playboy enjoyer. Nice