Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell

Description

More philosophical than a memoir, more moving than a philosophical text, this book allows us to think afresh about desire Unmastered is groundbreaking, incisive and moving. Exploring desire and pleasure, grief and pain, it underlines the importance and difficulties of speaking desire as a woman. How do we explore sexuality on our own terms, and find language for our desires, when desire and language are always social? Applying an unflinching gaze to her own life, Katherine Angel has created, in prose both stark and lyrical, a searching and erotic work shifting in meaning and resonance even as it is read.

Katherine Angel is a writer and academic. A Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University, her current research explores the history of female sexual problems in the UK and US, from the 1960s to the present. She has written on sexuality, pornography, and the relationship between culture and desire, for the Independent and Prospect.

Provocative and profoundly personal . . . it's hard to overestimate the riskiness of these passages, their courage and their exquisite sensuality . . . Unmastered is a giddily joyful book . . . days after reading its images linger in the mind . . . an elegant and uplifting journey -- Olivia Laing * Observer * Unmastered is written with an honesty so defiantly pure it amounts to an act of cultural resistance -- Adam Foulds, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Quickening Maze I think the highest compliment you can pay any book is that it is unafraid. Angel's fiercely intelligent and moving memoir of sexuality and desire is a challenging, vital work -- Sam Byers, Best Books of 2012 * Book Keeping * A moving and memorable read * Huffington Post Books of 2013 *