Jane Smiley Reading at the Brattle: Sex to the Max? - CANCELLED

Jane Smiley will be reading from Ten Days in the Hills at the Brattle Theatre at 6:00 pm tomorrow night. Tickets are $3 and are available from Harvard Book Store.

UPDATE: Ah, well. Weather is a bitch. Smiley won't be coming tonight. If you got tickets, Harvard Book Store has promised to refund them. Don't spend the 3 bucks all in one place, and cross your fingers that Smiley will be back.

When we think of authors and literary sex scenes, Jane Smiley isn't usually the first name to pop in our minds. But one paper gave its review of Smiley's latest, Ten Days in the Hills, the subhead "Sex to the Max." The Globe also made quite a bit of hay about the lovemaking in the book. Gail Caldwell counted 12 uses of the word "penetration" in one paragraph alone.

Suffice it to say, we are intrigued. Smiley also based the novel on Boccaccio's Decameron, but the Boccaccio seems to be the side dish to the main course of sex, at least as far as critics are concerned.

An excerpt of Ten Days in the Hills is available online. It seems dialogue-heavy and literary at first, but the novel starts with a "morning-after" scene, and Smiley throws in some references to kisses that are "springy, and full of suction" toward the end. We wonder if she'll be able to read her own material without blushing!

Image of Ten Days in the Hills cover from Random House.