From Publishers Weekly
"I am sitting on the threshold. Perhaps this is the final paradox of God's paradoxical machinations: my ass is my very own back door to heaven. The Pearly Gates are closer than you think." Bentley is writing of her rhapsodic experience with sodomy. So some will call this memoir blasphemous, others spiritual; some pornographic, others erotic. What it is, is wonderfully smart and sexy and witty and moving, a tale of unbounded passion that leads to transcendence. The tale is paradoxical in more ways than one: aside from Bentley's ass leading to heaven, she finds that submission leads to freedom—a freedom she had never known as a dancer with the New York City Ballet (about which she wrote her first book, Winter Season), nor in her failed marriage, nor in any of her other polymorphously perverse sexual experiences. While deeply serious, Bentley is also hilarious as she describes the delights of crotchless panties ("they come in many different styles—each with its own je ne sais quoi") and touching in an imagined obituary for her lover, A-Man ("He was the only one who took time to be friends with my cat.... He was the one with whom I couldn't tell whose pleasure gave me more pleasure"). Bentley's honesty about the most intimate of subjects is daring and delightful for those willing to follow her to, so to speak, the end. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
If you knew the name Toni Bentley before her self-combustion in The Surrender (ReganBooks, $24.95), it was probably for her extraordinarily agile contributions to the tiny world of ballet writing: Her first book was Winter Season (1982), produced at the tender age of 21 (early for a writer, not for a dancer). Exquisitely written -- as fleet and muscular as a thoroughbred -- the book was a splendid manifestation of grace and grit. She went on to ghostwrite Suzanne Farrell's virtuosic memoir, Hanging on to the Air, in which Bentley (a Balanchine product herself) captured the heady business of falling in love with one's own Pygmalion. Bentley wrote two more books after that, but she seemed to undergo the typical arc of the aging dancer: The books were less ambitious, signaling a diminishing agility -- these were character parts, no bravura performances. There was Costumes by Karinska, about Balanchine's costume designer, and then Sisters of Salome, about the seductions of dancing the part of the legendary femme fatale. But the principal roles seemed to elude her.Now, in her fifth decade, Bentley has turned the camera on herself in what can only be called a spectacular flameout. The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir is her account of her addiction to anal sex and her burning jones for an inamorato she identifies only as A-Man. The book, none of which can be adequately described in a family newspaper, is mind-boggling in its rawness. It is dirty, foul-mouthed, gawdy as redlight porn -- an apotheosis of female self-loathing. And yet the prose yearns, with the perverse grace of a long-past-it dancer, for readers to see it as art. More than one book critic -- mostly men -- have referred to it as "a masterpiece."Bentley calls her erotic quest "Finding Paradise," and she even summons God into the equation: "I am an atheist, by inheritance. I came to know God experientially, from being [expletived] in the [expletive]." You get the idea. Aside from the shock factor, which is considerable, there is a creeping ridiculousness here: Throughout the book she alludes to "the backstory" of her love story, the "behind-sight" of her perspective. When she confronts A-Man's Other Woman, she writes, "I guess she didn't know the whole of it. Or the half of it. Or the back half of it." By the time you finish this paean to her stern, you're red-faced as a schoolgirl: Not from the naughtiness, mind you. From the horselaughs. This once elegant writer is hoofing her heart out. And peeking in you are made to feel -- there's no other way to say it -- as silly as an ass.Submissive Positions Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


—Leon Wieseltier
"A small masterpiece of erotic writing."


—The New York Observer
"Plucky."


—Publishers Weekly starred review
"Wonderfully smart and sexy and witty and moving."


—New York Times Book Review
"Brave."


—Entertainment Weekly
"Stylish and amusing."


—Time Out New York
"Revealing and witty."


Book Description

This New York Times Notable Book is a stunning story of sexual and spiritual awakening.

Few women do it and even fewer will admit to it. But in Toni Bentley's daring and intimate memoir, The Surrender, she pulls the sheets back on an erotic experience that's been forbidden since the Bible and celebrates "the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides." From Story of O to The Kiss to The Sexual Life of Catherine M, readers have been enthralled with sexually subversive memoirs by women. But even those erotic classics didn't navigate the psychosexual terrain that Bentley does when she meets a lover who introduces her to a radical and unexpected pleasure, to the "holy" act that she came to see as her awakening.

The Surrender is a witty, intelligent, and eloquent exploration of one woman's obsession that will be sure to leave readers questioning their own desires.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This New York Times Notable Book is a stunning story of sexual and spiritual awakening.

Few women do it and even fewer will admit to it. But in Toni Bentley's daring and intimate memoir, The Surrender, she pulls the sheets back on an erotic experience that's been forbidden since the Bible and celebrates "the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides." From Story of O to The Kiss to The Sexual Life of Catherine M, readers have been enthralled with sexually subversive memoirs by women. But even those erotic classics didn't navigate the psychosexual terrain that Bentley does when she meets a lover who introduces her to a radical and unexpected pleasure, to the "holy" act that she came to see as her awakening.

The Surrender is a witty, intelligent, and eloquent exploration of one woman's obsession that will be sure to leave readers questioning their own desires.

About the Author:

Toni Bentley danced with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet for ten years. She is the author of Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal, Holding On to the Air: An Autobiography (by Suzanne Farrell with Toni Bentley), Costumes by Karin-ska and Sisters of Salome, all of which were New York Times Notable Books. She has written articles for numerous publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Allure, and Rolling Stone.

FROM THE CRITICS

Zoe Heller - The New York Times

The Surrender is a brave book -- although not because it tackles a ''taboo'' or because it is frank. (Candor is surely too epidemic in the popular culture, these days, to qualify any longer as courageous.) Its bravery lies rather in its earnest attempt to do justice to the transcendent dimension of a profane act. Sex, it is always claimed, is immensely difficult to write about. But that's not quite true. To recount the embarrassments and alienation of lackluster coitus is a relative doddle. It is good sex -- or great sex -- that presents the real challenges for a writer.

Publishers Weekly