Amazon.com Review
Is this sex in America? Let's hope so.
The Best American Erotica 1999 is a melting pot of inventive selections that run the gamut from bittersweet stories of youthful passion to Henry Miller-esque vignettes of cosmopolitan lust. There are detours along the way to raunchy merriment, steamy liaisons, erotic sorrow, and many other landmarks in the erotic landscape, both fresh and familiar.
Explore the bittersweet of yesterday and today, growing up with Elise D'Haene in an excerpt from "Licking Our Wounds." If Kirk-Spock fantasies are getting to be old hat, take a titillating peek into an amorous Boy Wonder's diary in Kelly McQuain's "Je T'aime, Batman, Je T'adore." The erotic imagination of America wouldn't be complete without a rock star fantasy: Ben Neihart's "The Number One Song in the Country" delivers, in spades. Cecelia Tan suggests an answer to the age-old question of what women do in bed together--and provides some ingenious toy ideas for those who already know--in her thrilling "Penetrations." And celebrating our ever-increasing Internet usage, Robin Sweeney's "Picking Up Daddy" provides an exhilarating narrative about nervously meeting and amorously greeting a lover met online.
The fabric of America's erotic life--twosomes, threesomes, same sex, opposite sex, gender benders, realistic sex, outrageous fantasies, revenge fantasies, dainty love stories, no-holds-barred one-night stands, and more--is well chronicled in this anthology from sexpert Susie Bright. --Cheryl Trooskin
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The latest entry in this series, now in its ninth year, offers something for just about everyone. Old boundaries are clearly irrelevant: straight, gay, bi or transgender are typical, often with variations pawing for attention in the same story. One trend is a kind of literary cross-dressing: in "Cowboy," Adelina Anthony invents an oversexed gay Latino stud who gets a big surprise from his latest conquest, while in "Backhand," Ernie Conrick writes about a young female tennis player who is challenged by a sadistic Navratilova type. Some of the stories are told in the second person (a shortcut to reader intimacy): these are either satires, like "When to Use" (selected from Nerve.com), by Stacey Richter, or breathless monologues, like "The Whole Bloody Story of My Life," by Shaun Levin, and Jamie Callan's "Talk About Sex: An Orientation." (The publisher seems to have taken the latter title literally: the collection contains a reading group guide.) Novel excerpts don't always click as well as the complete stories, but perhaps they work as foreplay. "Driving Lesson," from J.T. Leroy's Sarah, hardly needs more hype, but here it is alongside selections from Jane Smiley, Francesca Lia Block and Maggie Estep. Story locations run the gamut: at home, at work, in a wet suit, on the subway, in a trailer park, in dirty motels, underwater or on a deathbed. Bright knows that sex writing is subject to fads and fashions, but never goes out of style here she presents evidence of how it "gets messier every day."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
