Plot: Aspiring intellectual, treated by six shrinks and married to a seventh, goes to a conference in Europe and whines.

Why it's on the list: Three words that changed civilization as we know it: The zipless fuck. Oddly, the phrase is explained by a rather halfhearted Anaïs Nin-type vignette (a soldier and widow encounter each other on a train, but the sex is consummated off camera, as the train enters a dark tunnel). The major sex scene, other than masturbatory action, involves a limp penis.

Excerpt: The "phallos" belonged to Steve Applebaum, a junior and art major when I was a freshman and art major, and it had a most memorable abstract design of blue veins on its Kandinsky-purple underside. In retrospect, it was a remarkable specimen: circumcised, of course, and huge (what is huge when you have no frame of reference?), and with an impressive life of its own. As soon as it began to make its drumlinlike presence known under the tight zipper of Steve's chinos (we were necking and "petting-below-the-waist" as one said then), he would slowly unzip (so as not to snag it?) and with one hand (the other was under my skirt and up my cunt) extract the huge purple thing from between the layers of his shorts, his blue Brooks-Brothers shirttails, and his cold, glittering, metal-zippered fly. Then I would dip one hand into the vase of roses my flower-loving mother always kept on the coffee table, and with a right hand moistened with water and the slime from their stems, I would proceed with my rhythmic jerking off of Steve.