Isham Cook, an English teacher in China, has it all worked out. He lives a highly ordered life of the mind and is not one to be swayed by circumstance, until his dispassionate existence is tripped up by Cookie, an elusive woman fleetingly glimpsed around his gritty Beijing neighborhood. He then becomes captivated by the flamboyant eroticism of a woman he meets on the subway, Luna, who radically overhauls his most basic preconceptions. A third woman of ambiguous Asiatic ethnicity, the beautiful Adalat, is as unknowable as the others and he becomes obsessed with her as well. Finally, a fourth character appears with the ultimate trump card, one capable of pulling apart the very coordinates of Isham's reality, including the narrative itself.

A hypnotic journey of a novel, with idea bombs going off along the way, Lust & Philosophy is mind-rape as literature, a fairytale on acid, and a holographic Rorschach test all in one, and will appeal to fans of Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard and other novelists of the uncanny.

A foreign teacher struggles with proper whipping technique on his female student, while another gives his student a mysterious substance otherwise known as LSD. One foreign teacher is suspected of secretly filming his students in the nude, while another seems to have brainwashed his class into a sex cult. In other stories, a sex robot rapes its owner, a female professor trolls cafes minus her underwear, a store clerk softens up a stingy customer with his fist, and a foreigner comprehends all too slowly the home he is visiting is not a family but a scam. Whether it's locals colliding with foreigners or with each other on the big chessboard with no rules called China, this pioneering collection of delightfully disturbing tales by one unruly foreigner dredges up comedy blacker than a black hole. "Cook's erotic-grotesque collection of encounters can't be beat for its look into the absurdist funhouse mirror of expatriate existence in China"-James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai "Strips away the literary decorum of the old guard of China writers and presents us with an intoxicating, and at times toxic, Chinese cocktail of freshly fashioned creations of flesh and fantasy"-Tom Carter, Unsavory Elements "Breaks all taboos...reminiscent of Sing-song Girls of Shanghai"-Susan Blumberg-Kason, Good Chinese Wife"