The Sexes: Winged Pigs

Line one of Chapter 1 consists of three of the Italian language's least printable words, strung together in a scatological drumbeat. The chapter then depicts Antonia, the 16-year-old heroine of the story, masturbating as she falls asleep. In the course of the next 185 pages, she and Rocco, her 17-year-old boy friend, sample a farrago of sex, including sodomy and homosexual affairs. But sex is only one of the reasons that the novel Winged Pig* has become a sensational bestseller in Italy.

Subtitled The Sexo-Political Diary of Two Adolescents, the paperback has been...

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