In a generation where it’s all about digital, visual and quick information, it’s easy to forget about the literary greats that contain endless wisdom about our world and ourselves. These steamy literary passages will have you questioning why you ever scroll through Netflix when you can pick up a book instead…

1. High school sweethearts reunite after years apart in “Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

High School Sweethearts from Lagos, Nigeria, Ifemelu and Obinze reunite after years apart. Obinze has since married another woman since their youthful courtship, but the connection between them is long-lasting and the two can’t resist falling back into their comfortable, electric attraction.

“There was, between them, a weightless, seamless desire. She leaned in and kissed him, and at first he was slow in his response, and then he was pulling up her blouse, pushing down her bra cups to free her breasts. She remembered clearly the firmness of his embrace, and yet there was, also, a newness to their union; their bodies remembered and did not remember. She touched the scar on his chest, remembering it again. She had always thought the expression ‘making love’ a little maudlin; ‘having sex’ felt truer and ‘fucking’ was more arousing, but lying next to him afterwards, both of them smiling, sometimes laughing, her body suffused with peace, she thought how apt it was, that expression ‘making love.’ There was an awakening even in her nails, in those parts of her body that had always been numb. She wanted to tell him, ‘There is no week that passed that I did not think of you.’ But was that true? Of course there were weeks during which he was folded under layers of her life, but it felt true.”

2. The teenage protagonist loses his virginity to his teacher in “This is How You Lose Her” by Junot Diaz

Yunior loses his virginity to a woman twice his age, who also happens to be a professor at his school. The loss of innocence mingled with the pure excitement and emotion of the first time. Diaz’ simplistic writing style makes it all the more erotic (and leaves room for the imagination).

“You wonder if she feels like you do. Like it might be love. You put on Threads for her. Get ready for some real shit, you say. Get ready for me to hide, she responds, but you two only last an hour before she reaches over and takes off your glasses and kisses you. This time your wits are back so you try to find the strength to fight her off. I can’t, you say. And just before she pops your rabo in her mouth she says: Really? You try to think of Paloma, so exhausted that every morning she falls asleep on the ride to school… You’re trying to think of her but what you’re doing is holding Miss Lora’s tresses like reins and urging her head to keep its wonderful rhythm. You really do have an excellent body, you say after you blow your load. Why, thank you. She motions with her head. You want to go into the bedroom? Even more fotos. None of them will survive the nuclear blast, you are sure. Nor will this bedroom, whose window faces toward New York City. You tell her that. Well, we’ll just have to make do, she says. She gets naked like a pro and once you start she closes her eyes and rolls her head around like it’s on a broken hinge. She clasps your shoulders with a nailed grip as strong as shit and you know that after, your back is going to look like it’s been whipped. Then she kisses your chin.”

3. A young man reunites with his love after being banished by her family in “Endless Love” by Scott Spencer

Jade Butterfield and David Elliot take the term high-school sweethearts to the next level with their eroticism and obsession. In this endless, borderline gruesome scene they are reuniting in a hotel room after David has been banished from Jade’s life by her parents.

“As soon as her body began to jerk and shudder in response to her climax, I found myself astoundingly moved— as if by choral music that surprises you, or a kiss from behind bestowed by your lover on tiptoes. Jade let out her high keening call and I felt an abrupt rush of my semen, racing through me like twin rivers, turning with an acidic twist but not slowing down. I grabbed hold of her back, instinctually afraid she might leave me, and I arched myself toward her as I came. I could sense my pleasure passing through me almost unnoticed and I tried to fix my entire concentration on it. A perceptual lunge— like trying to discover the silver arc of a shooting star whose dive through the sky you’ve just caught out of the corner of your eye. When Jade felt the blurry warmth of my climax, she moved up a little and tightened herself for a slow, deliberate slide down. Whatever semen I had surrendered at the coaxing of Jade’s fingers had left a prodigious storehouse behind— almost a creepy abundance. My scrotum, feet, hands went icy cold and my mouth— moments before filled with the slosh of desire— was dry as a wafer. My muscles were collapsing, my lungs shriveled like burst balloons, but I continued to come. Jade looked down at me. Smiled. Her eyes were glassy, indistinct, like someone who has breathed in smoke. A burning room.”

And then a few pages later…

“’Come in me,”’she said. She lifted herself up with her hands around my neck and kissed me. Then she reached down for me and pressed the head of my penis into her. “I want to feel us,” she said. And when I lowered myself upon her and sank as deep as I could go, her voice was replaced by that high keening hum. I watched her face as best I could. Those strange contortions that would be so horrible under any other circumstances. Her lips parting, stretching, her mouth opening in a silent howl. Eyes closed and then suddenly open, staring up at me with real helplessness, mixed with hunger and surprise. The heel of her hand hit my chest; it seemed for a moment as if she were going to try to push me off of her. But it passed. She was rising toward me, levitating, holding on with her hard competent hands. I could feel her reaching her climax and I almost stopped because I didn’t want it to end. It was, after all, how we’d taught each other to make love: the sin of the Adamites; the psychedelia of the suppressed orgasm. Each time I stopped, the eventual come would be more powerful. Each interlude would send us streaming closer together. But as I slowed my pace she quickened hers and her grip had a sternness in its strength, an undertaste of fury. I thought that if I didn’t carry through she might actually punch me in the mouth. And so I slipped my hands beneath her rump so no matter what our bodies did they would be touching and I would stay in her as deep as possible. The hum became a kind of toneless noise, like the loudest part of a yawn stretched out indefinitely… We were moving like mad and suddenly I could feel her inner walls in terrifying detail, as if I’d gotten fifty times thicker. We came, first Jade and then me, moments behind her, holding each other, and our voices joining, forming one wild and unbearably lonely cry.”

4. A man explores homosexuality in Paris in “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s steamy affair with a Parisian man gets philosophical in this excerpt…

“’Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.’ But this time when I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known.”

5. A new graduate struggles with the seemingly impossible task of making a woman orgasm in “Innocence” by Harold Brodkey

Wiley Silenowicz has one goal: to make the strong and beautiful Orra Perkins orgasm…

“I suddenly realized how physically strong Orra was, how well-knit, how well put together her body was, how great the power in it, the power of endurance in it; and a phrase — absurd and demeaning but exciting just then — came into my head: to throw a fuck, and I settled atop her, braced my toes and knees and elbows and hands on the bed and half-scramblingly worked it — it was clearly mine, but I was Orra’s — worked it into a passionate shove, a curving stroke about a third as long as a full stroke, but amateur and gentle, that is, tentative still; and Orra screamed then; how she screamed; she made known her readiness: then the next time, she grunted: ‘Uhnnn-nahhhhhh . . .’ a sound thick at the beginning but that trailed into refinement, into sweetness, a lingering sweetness…

She took the thrust: she convulsed a little; she fluttered all over; her skin fluttered; things twitched in her, in the disorder surrounding the phallic blow in her. After two thrusts, she collapsed, went flaccid, then toughened and readied herself again, rose a bit from the bed, aimed the flattened, mysteriously funnel-like container of her lower end at me, too high, so that I had to pull her down with my hands on her butt or on her hips; and her face, when I glanced at her beneath my lids, was fantastically pleasing, set, concentrated, busy, harassed; her body was strong, was stone, smooth stone and wet-satin paper bags and snaky webs, thin and alive, made of woven snakes that lived, thrown over the stone; she held the great, writhing-skinned stone construction toward me, the bony marvel, the half-dish of bone with its secretive, gluey-smooth entrance, the place where I was — it was undefined, except for that: the place where I was: she took and met each thrust — and shuddered and collapsed and rose again: she seemed to rise to the act of taking it; I thought she was partly mistaken, childish, to think that the center of sex was to meet and take the prick thrown into her as hard as it could be thrown, now that she was excited; but there was a weird wildness, a wild freedom, like children cavorting, uncontrolled, set free, but not hysterical merely without restraint; the odd, thickened, knobbed pole springing back and forth as if mounted on a web of wide rubber bands; it was a naïve and a complete release. I whomped it in and she went, ‘UHNNN!’ and a half-iota of a second later, I was seated all the way in her, I jerked a minim of an inch deeper in her, and went: ‘UHNN!’ too. Her whole body shook. She would go, ‘UHN!’ And I would go, ‘UHN!’”