Erica Jong Books in Order

A recent book of poems that blends political unease, family stories, astrophysics, and aging into brief, punchy lyrics. Jong writes about grandchildren, her mother’s death, and daily pleasures, insisting on saying yes to life even while recognizing how fragile bodies, memory, and communities can be.

Sixty year old actress Vanessa Wonderman juggles frail parents, an aging husband, a new grandchild, and her own undimmed hunger for sex and adventure. Her online flirtations collide with illness and loss, forcing her to rethink what intimacy and courage look like late in life.

This short polemic frames an open letter to the United States president as a plea on behalf of American women. Jong lays out worries about reproductive rights, economic justice, and cultural backlash, blending personal experience with plainspoken political anger and guarded hope.

An anthology edited by Jong in which women writers of many ages and backgrounds write frankly about desire, fantasy, long marriages, and bad sex. Essays, stories, and cartoons explore how sexuality intersects with motherhood, aging, power, and shame in women’s real lives.

This later collection returns to love in all its forms, from erotic obsession to grief for lost parents and friends. The poems are frank, funny, and reflective, shaped by a writer who has lived through fame and heartbreak and is now thinking hard about what endures.

Part memoir and part craft book, this collection of essays follows Jong through love affairs, marriages, addiction, and writer’s block as she wrestles with the “demons” that drive her work. It offers a candid look at how obsession, fear, and joy all feed a writing life.

A playful historical novel that reimagines the life of Sappho, the legendary poet of Lesbos. From forced marriage and exile to wild adventures with pirates, sorceresses, and Amazons, Sappho’s quest for love and artistic freedom becomes a feminist odyssey through the ancient world.

In these essays Jong tackles politics, literature, sex, and celebrity with her usual mix of humor and bluntness. She writes about power, beauty myths, mothers and daughters, and the challenges facing outspoken women while asking what equality and pleasure should look like in modern life.

This family saga follows four generations of Jewish women, from a pogrom in Russia to contemporary New York. As a young historian uncovers her foremothers’ lives, the novel explores memory, immigration, art, and how daughters inherit both wounds and strength from their mothers.

A midlife memoir in which Jong looks back on childhood, parents, marriages, fame, and feminism from the vantage point of turning fifty. Moving between past and present, she writes about desire, aging, family duty, and what it means to keep creating in middle age.

Jong’s portrait of Henry Miller blends biography, literary criticism, and personal reminiscence. She revisits his life and work, remembers their friendship, and uses his example to investigate censorship, sexual honesty on the page, and the complicated power dynamic between muse and mentor.

A wide ranging volume of new and selected poems in which Jong looks back on wild years, addictions, marriages, and creative highs. The work wrestles with demons of desire and self destruction yet keeps returning to the possibility of forgiveness, steady love, and a hard won inner peace.

World famous painter and recovering addict Leila Sand is hooked on a charming but destructive younger lover. As their affair spirals through betrayal, obsession, and self sabotage, Leila must choose between the chaos she craves and the sobriety, friendship, and art that could save her.

Set between contemporary Venice and the world of Shakespeare, this time bending novel follows film star Jessica Pruitt, who slips back into the sixteenth century and into the body of Shylock’s daughter. Her journey entwines love, theater, politics, and the dark history of the ghetto.

Isadora Wing returns as a divorced writer and single mother trying to balance literary success, an ex husband, a beloved daughter, and an often ridiculous lineup of suitors. The novel pokes fun at baby boomer privilege while tracing Isadora’s search for real intimacy in middle age.

Told in the voice of six year old Megan, this illustrated story follows a child learning to live with divorced parents, two homes, and their new partners. With honesty and gentle humor, it validates kids’ anger and confusion while showing that love can survive family change.

Poems about pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, divorce, and renewal that treat domestic life as a source of both comedy and awe. Jong pays attention to small daily transformations and the resilient bonds between parents and children, lovers and friends, in language that feels intimate and musical.

A richly illustrated exploration of the witch as historical figure and archetype, mixing folklore, feminist commentary, poetry, and recipes for charms and potions. Jong traces how goddesses became demons, how wise women became scapegoats, and why witchcraft still speaks to women’s hunger for power and magic.

This companion volume continues the selection from her first three collections, balancing the satirical and sensual sides of Jong’s voice. It gathers love poems, feminist pieces, and travel lyrics that show how her early work moves between vulnerability, rage, and mischievous humor.

In this exuberant eighteenth century style romp, orphaned Fanny Hackabout Jones is determined to become a great poet but instead tumbles through brothels, manor houses, and pirate ships. The novel parodies classic picaresque tales while letting a clever, lusty heroine tell her own story.

In these meditative poems Jong turns from youthful bravado toward questions of aging, illness, and spiritual restlessness. She writes about the body as both pleasure and burden, about marriage and travel, and about how to stay fully alive while living with the knowledge of death.

The first of two paperback selections drawn from Jong’s early books Fruits and Vegetables, Half-Lives, and Loveroot. It highlights her most quoted poems on love, anger, and the body, giving new readers a compact introduction to her strongest early work.

Picking up several years after Fear of Flying, this sequel finds Isadora Wing famous, restless, and trapped in a failing marriage. A trip to California and Hollywood throws her into affairs, gurus, and movie deals as she tests whether freedom can coexist with loyalty and love.

A boxed set collecting Fruits and Vegetables, Half-Lives, and Loveroot in one slipcase. Together these volumes show Jong evolving from a playful young surrealist into a poet who writes more openly about women’s anger, joy, and longing during the years of the sexual revolution.

Written soon after the success of Fear of Flying, this collection celebrates desire, books, and female friendship with a bold, conversational voice. Jong riffs on other writers, jokes about therapy and fame, and keeps circling the central question of what real erotic freedom might look like.

A mass market gathering of Jong’s early verse, originally published in Fruits and Vegetables and Half-Lives. It offers an accessible doorway into her first decade of poetry, charting her shift from experimental wordplay to more direct, confessional pieces about sex, politics, and literary life.

This second book of poems is sharper in tone, focusing on women’s work, sexuality, ambition, and fear. The poems move between offices, bedrooms, and art studios, using humor and candor to expose how women are judged for wanting both passion and autonomy.

Jong’s breakthrough novel introduces Isadora Wing, a 29 year old poet who flies to a psychoanalysts’ conference in Vienna with her husband and impulsively runs off with another analyst. Her road trip across Europe becomes a funny, raw examination of marriage, fantasy, and female freedom.

Jong’s first poetry collection mixes surreal, witty, and erotic poems about the female body, city life, politics, and art. Everyday objects turn into lovers or enemies, and the speaker tries to claim pleasure and power in a culture that keeps telling her to stay small.