Christopher Castellani Recommends

“Rarely do we get to peek into the pornography of great writers,” Castellani writes. “Not so with E. M. Forster. In fact, many readers and admirers are not aware that Forster wrote his own porn — a dozen or so short stories collected in the bawdy little volume The Life To Come.

Forster wrote these stories ‘not to express myself but to excite myself’ and knew they (like Maurice) dealt too candidly with (homo)sexuality to be published in his lifetime. Unlike Maurice, though, the stories are far from romantic or sentimental. They are brutal, eerie, ironic, damning of a hypocritical society, and more than a little twisted, even by today’s standards all without resorting to a single explicit sex scene. As in allgreat literature, the characters in The Life to Come are fully human and encounter various emotional obstacles; most of them just happen to involve illicit trysts.

You may want to keep a copy on your nightstand.”

Christopher Castellani was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents immigrated to the United States from a small village in Italy in the years following World War II, and their experiences have been a significant inspiration. Castellani’s first novel, A Kiss From Maddalena, was published in 2003, and won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction in 2004. His second novel, The Saint of Lost Things, is published this month.