Customer Reviews

Got a Minute?: 60 Second Erotica

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4 star:		(1)
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It's not 60 reasons to read these 60 sexy stories, but just enough...

1. 60 NOT-that-short pieces, seriously there are only 2 that take up a paragraph or so. The rest are between 2-5 pages, so just right.

2. It covers lots of kink, if one is not working for you, skip it - there's plenty else to choose from!

3. Lots of stories = lots of entries from favorite authors, a few had 2-3 each!

4. A hectic schedule means I don't get a lot of time, so the short-shorts were perfect to read for a little bit at lunch or right before bed (see #5).

5. Easy to flag a page and hand it over. The short-shorts meant it didn't take my husband long to read (and respond)!

6. The new cover is much more read-in-public friendly.

Bonus: If you make it through, make sure to take N.T. Morley's quiz. Definite keeper material!

Short erotica sometimes gets a bad reputation.

Of course, much erotic fiction gets a bad reputation, but short stories are unfairly derided even within the genre as being "beat material". Poorly written, and nothing more than two people devoid of any character having mechanically described sex. This sort of stuff fills much of the internet; its not hard to find.

Wouldn't it be nice to read some short, short erotica that rises above that sordid reputation to something tastier, more arousing, and better written?

Although erotic novels build up the heat and passion between its characters over time, some days, you don't want to spend the time reading to build the heat, and just want to jump into the fire. Just like sometimes, you want to sample a flavor that accumulates in the mouth, and sometimes you want to try the habanero mango salsa and feel the sharp pain quickly.

In Got a Minute, edited by Alison Tyler, you can.

Got a Minute brings together over 50 stories to this task--write a short, short story, bring a hot situation to fruition quickly, and write it well.

Given those bounds, and given the stable of authors on tap here, its difficult not to find a sheaf of stories to like. Shanna Germain gives us a protagonist who tells you, in the second person, the best way to spank her.Rachel Kramer Bussel gives us two lovers, a banker and a lawyer, whose mouths devour each other's bodies deliciously in the summer heat. Bonnie Dee shows us how the dual acts of massage and painting toenails can lead to explosively erotic results.

IAnd if you don't like a particular kink or author, a new situation and author is just a minute away in this anthology, waiting for you to jump into another fiery furnace of erotic heat and desire.

Surprisingly, though, given the word count strictures, some of the stories go beyond a mere hot sexual situation and bring more interesting and unexpected things into the mix.

Inga Mahn's Backroom Sally, for instance, puts a delicious twist into the idea of a coin-operated sex machine. The editor herself,. Alison Tyler, manages to mingle a heartbreaking story of a past relationship into the current hot one in "No-Win Situation".

That's the greatest strength of the virtues of this anthology. Not the hot sexual situations that will fuel your imagination. Not the variety of authors with their points of view, writing styles, and ideas on display. No, its the sheer surprise and encapsulation of the unexpected in these stories that lift the sub-genre of short erotica from the sordid into the realm of erotic literature.

A truly tasting anthology that I reservedly recommend.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested
- Sir Francis Bacon

When I was a kid, my mother had a bookmark with Bacon's quotation printed on it. As an avid reader, the phrase has always stayed with me. My mother fed me a steady diet of good books, my AP courses in high school had me exposed to the majority of the white male western canon, and my undergraduate and graduate literature programs allowed me to explore great works outside of the establishment. Even if I didn't always like what I read, I very rarely got the sense that I had been exposed to something only worth tasting. Almost everything I read was at least swallowable.

Then, a year out of graduate school, I began reading (and writing) erotica. With no parents, teachers, mentors, or well-read friends to act as a filter, I encountered a great deal of smut that was not even taste-worthy. Through trial, error, and the help of my local feminist bookstore, I eventually figured out which editors and writers I enjoyed, and used those guidelines to expand my reading selection. Still, as someone who had spent 25 years raised on a diet of Literature, I struggled to find erotic stories that I felt were really digestable - heck, I had a difficult time finding those I could really swallow. I read through collections and would remember very few details about stories or authors.

Then, I found a used copy of Herotica 3, and read "My Date With Marcie." This was exactly the kind of erotica I was looking for. It made me laugh, it made me cringe in just the right way (a story about high school students having sex would just not seem realistic without a cringe moment or two), and it turned me on. I imagine that, even in ten years, when people ask me about my favorite erotic story, I will still be saying "My Date With Marcie."

What I'm getting at with this lengthy introduction is that Got a Minute? is the kind of collection where you're going to digest all the stories. They're all short works (1,500 words max), but their brevity does not inhibit their sexual, emotional, or intellectual impact. When I look back at the end of 2010 and think of the most memorable stories I read this year, I have a feeling those at the top of the list are going to come from Got a Minute.

"Transformations," by Jen Cross, is a story that has been haunting me ever since I finished it. It's a lesbian love story with gender play and perhaps the only example of shapeshifting I've ever seen that has nothing to do whatsoever with the paranormal. It has a quality of magical realism about it, a quality that makes it really stand out as literary smut.

Andrea Dale's "From Bitter to Sweet" is snappy, sexy, and a little sarcastic - and the best piece of breakup erotica I have ever read. A little angry and very hot, Dale's smart narrator makes her way from a breakup to new love, and it's an edible journey the entire time (and exactly what I needed as I deal with my own emotional upheaval).

I could write a praise-filled blurb for every story in this collection, but there are 60-some stories in here, and I just don't have that kind of time. So in closing, I'll summarize the book this way: Got a Minute? is the most memorable collection I have ever read. There are straight, lesbian, and gay stories; there are vanilla and kink stories; there are stories that last only a paragraph and those that take a few pages. This book has the honor of being one of my favorite collections.