A window into a life of insatiable desire and uninhibited sex - this is Parisian art critic Catherine M.'s account of her sexual awakening and her unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. From the glamorous singles clubs of Paris to the Bois de Boulogne, she describes her erotic experiences in precise and beautiful detail. A phenomenal bestseller throughout Europe, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., like Fifty Shades of Grey, breaks with accepted ideas of sex and examines many alternative manifestations of desire. Told in spare, elegant prose, her story will shock, enlighten and liberate you.

Using her own body as raw material for her artistic practice, French artist ORLAN deconstructs the traditional iconography of the feminine. In the 1990s, ORLAN caused a sensation with surgical operations performed on her body, but it was as early as 1964, at the age of 17, that she gave birth to her artistic self. Since then, she has continuously recreated herself and keenly explored the concept of identity. In her "carnal art," the body becomes both subject and object. This publication traverses the six decades of ORLAN's oeuvre, revisiting her early performances in particular. One of her most recent creations is the ORLANOIDE robot, and thanks to an augmented reality app, ORLAN avatars come to life and emerge from this richly illustrated volume. The political status of the body is made evident through all of her works: in 1989 she transformed Gustave Courbet's famous painting L'origine du monde into L'origine de la guerre by replacing the vulva with the phallus. The statement has not lost any of its topicality.

A national best-seller that was featured on such lists as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and Publishers Weekly, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. was the controversial sleeper hit of the year. Since her youth, Catherine Millet, the eminent editor of Art Press, has led an extraordinarily active and free sexual life -- from al fresco encounters in Italy to a gang bang on the edge of the Bois du Boulogne to a high-class orgy at a chichi Parisian restaurant. A graphic account of sex stripped of sentiment, of a life of physical gratification and a relentlessly honest look at the consequences -- both liberating and otherwise -- have created this candid, powerful, and deeply intelligent depiction of unfettered sexuality.