There’s good sex and there’s bad sex. And then there’s weird sex—a Freudian purgatory that somehow neither stimulates the libido nor inhibits it. In art and life, we’re inclined to seek out pleasure to combat unpleasant reality. The sex in these books is too odd or awkward or off-kilter for that. I return to it to remember that little makes us feel more exposed, vulnerable, and humiliatingly human than taking off your clothes with another person—or alien, statue, vegetable, or disembodied arm.

Vanessa Roveto is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles.