The 25 Sexiest Sentences From Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Novel, Ranked
A Listicle Without Commentary
25. “’To be and not to be. That is the answer.’”
24. “now you deserve to get fucked in the ass”
23. “Jacob and Julia had batted about the notion of having the bar mitzvah in Israel — the Jewish coming-of-age version of eloping.”
22. “If it flushed, he fucked it.”
21. “’Well, you know about heaven, right?’ Jacob said, causing a nonexistent angel to lose its wings.”
20. “give me your cum, then you can have my cock”
19. “In the car, Tamir pressd the sole of his right foot against the windshield, parachuting his scrotum for any infra-red traffic cameras they might pass.”
18. “i don’t care if you cum, but i’ll make you cum anyway”
17. “They could go to couples therapy, but Jacob had implied a bizarre loyalty to Dr. Silvers, which would have made seeing someone else a transgression (a greater transgression, apparently, than requesting a shot of fecal cum from a woman who was not his wife)…”
16.”He tied rubber bands around his wrist — rubber bands being to masturbation what flour is to baking — to make his fingers go numb so he would no longer recognize them as his own.”
15. “He tried to fuck his own asshole, but that required pushing his boner in the direction it most didn’t want to go, like a drawbridge being forced to touch the water.”
14. “Tamir lifted Irv from the ground, pushing a small fart out of him — an anal Heimlich.”
13. “you’re begging me to fuck your tight pussy, but you don’t deserve it yet”
12. “It would have helped to have had a bona fide experience with a bona fide vagina, but his inability not to hear ‘boner fide’ made the chances of that as nugatory as did his use of the word nugatory.”
11. “i want to see you dripping onto your asshole”
10. “He was able to rub his scrotum around his asshole, but that only made him melancholy.”
9. “Vegans live longer, and are healthier, and have better skin, and she could do that; it would be easy, if someone shopped, cooked, and cleaned for her.”
8. “Blessing are just curses other people envy.”
7. “Of course, he had unlimited access to more free porn than could be watched over the course of the lifetimes of every citizen in China, but even an anus-crazed twelve-year-old appreciates the correlation between the mental work required and the magnitude of the nut, hence his ultimate fantasy of intercepting some Arab virgin on her way to get fucked by an actual martyr, tucking his head under her burka, and, in that deep-space, sensory-deprived blackness, licking orbits around Heranus.”
6. “By the third day, his pubes were pipe cleaners and his shaft was leprous.”
7. “The rabbi asked, ‘What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?’”
6. “cum on my mouth”
5. “Irv’s knee-jerk response triggered a reflex in Jacob’s brain’s knee, and within a few exchanges they were rhetorical Russian wedding dancers — arms crossed, kicking at everything but anything.”
4. “He fucked the soles of his feet like some kind of horndog maharishi.”
3. “Life is precious, and I live in the world.”
2. “Sometimes, in less proud moments, he would even talk to his sperm as his semen congealed in his belly button.”
- “‘It’s a lose-lose.’ They both laughed. ‘It’s a love-love.’”
Carmen Petaccio received his MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He lives in Austin, Texas.
