What if you fell in love with a man while married to a woman?
What if you showed up for a university exam and your professor was naked?
What if you were the only woman on an island of shipwrecked sailors?
What if the gods had to deal with the sexual politics of scandal?
 
In this provocative and beautifully designed new issue of Granta, twenty-one writers take on the toughest topic of all - sex - from an array of shocking angles. The writing is by turns gritty, erotic, profound, meditative and hilarious. From the musicology of Zimbabwean sexual politics to the frankly erotic tale of a man seducing his lover in the pages of a national newspaper, this issue of Granta proves that it is possible to write seriously (and seriously well) about sex.
 
The Half King is thrilled to welcome Granta magazine and some of the contributors that make the Spring SEX issue one of their best ever. Please join us as we welcome National book award winner Mark Doty, and the inimitable Jenifer Egan, as they read from their essay and fiction contributions to this unforgettable issue.
 
Mark Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards  and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
 
Jennifer Egan is the author of three novels, The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the bestselling The Keep, and a short story collection, Emerald City. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and Ploughshares, among others, and her journalism appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her upcoming novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, will be published in June by Alfred A. Knopf.