Over the four years that I wrote my column Jack's Naughty Bits, I began and ended with a few lines of Dante's Inferno that I thought encapsulated perfectly everything the Naughty Bits was about. The scene is Dante's famous encounter with Paolo and Francesca, the couple who went to Hell for an adulterous love spurred on by reading a racy book. Paolo and Francesca's story dramatizes the power I've always thought books should possess: to move, to stir the senses, to elicit thoughts, feelings, moods, memories and even illicit kisses from one's secret paramour. We read to feel, and I hope, if you read my "bits", that they help you feel as moved and motivated as Francesca.

Adapted from the introduction to Classic Nasty: More Naughty Bits. A Rollicking Guide to Hot Sex in Great Books from The Iliad to TheCorrections, to be published next month by Four Walls/Eight Windows Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.