Zoe Heller, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet (under Ballanchine!), has written books before, mainly about dance. Her most recent book, though, is a departure from all that. It's called "The Beauty of Submission," and it's sole subject matter is the joy of... well, getting fucked in the ass.

Bizarre enough, yes, but who'd have thought to find it reviewed in no less august a journal than the New York Times? The surreality of it is not to be missed.

"[N]o woman before Bentley has felt quite zealous enough about what she calls ''emancipation through the back door'' to write an entire book in its praise. Bentley credits sodomy with having resolved the lifelong psychosexual problems that resulted from not being loved enough by her father. (In one luridly Freudian episode of this book, [her father] is described punishing his 4-year-old daughter for some minor infraction by angrily smearing a banana on her face and in her hair.) By giving herself up to ''this forbidden pathway,'' Bentley writes, she has not only found her self, she has discovered ''Paradise,'' she has experienced ''eternity in a moment of real time,'' and she has gotten to know God ''experientially.'' That's not all. She is also pretty sure that anal sex is responsible for piercing her yang, forcing her yin to the surface and releasing decades of anger stored in her lower intestine."
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