The Sadness of Sex (Paperback)

by Barry Yourgrau (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
A group of women remove their private parts, wash them, and hang the pelts on trees to dry. A woman masquerading as a lioness devours her lover. A man carves out his wounded heart, buries it and becomes all the more successful with women. The figure of a clothed girl trapped for centuries in an icy glacier causes the ever soulful male narrator to relinquish his hopes for his own romantic future. In performance artist Yourgrau's new collection, such odd, luminous visions pulse with sadness and humor, loss, irony and desire. The 90 brief but achingly substantial stories most often include a lovelorn male voyeur whose surreal encounters with otherworldly women highlight his suspicion that his is the weaker sex, given to pleading, victimization and endless unnameable yearnings. Death figures again and again, but in the hands of the author of Wearing Dad's Head and A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, mortality is marked not by finality but by transformation, so that the reckless impulses of the living give way to a somnolent and receptive grace. A drowned man, ministered by mermaids, muses, "They laugh, and push me and pet me, in ignorance of my condition, my sad, human flaw." These are deeply convincing, uncommonly imaginative fictions, told with unparalled style and elegant emotion.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description
Also a film online at Ifilm, and a selection of the first Yahoo Film Festival, The Sadness of Sex is an exhilarating new collection of fiction. The author explores the imagination's twilit terrain in which love, lust and loss reside.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 255 pages
• Publisher: Delta; Later Printing edition (February 2, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385313764
• ISBN-13: 978-0385313766
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #414,147 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sadness of Sex: An intoxicating adventure, February 14, 1997

By A Customer

When was the last time that you read a collection of short stories so well written and colourful and that you could taste the words thick in your mouth and you flinched at the imagery. Seldom does one stumble across the work of a writer that can demonstrate such a clear understanding and command of the English language as Barry Yourgrau. In The Sadness of Sex, Yourgrau cleverly exposes an upside-down and inside-out non-reality to us by skillfully articulating those curiously insane and fleeting thoughts that most of us would fear to ever entertain. He writes in a contemporary style that is nothing short of profoundly unique. Unique because his words innocently catch you up in imaginary nets fashioned from the fabric of insightful and disturbing comedic absurdities and imagery. The Sadness of Sex is a collection of short attention span short stories, most between two and three pages long. This book is a charming collection of fiction that tricks you into simulaneously entertaining a poetic intimacy and a twisted sense of melancholy. It is a quiet journey into a world of colourful visions and lucid dreams that are a delightfully engaging and startlingly surreal. Yourgrau's The Sadness of Sex is not for everyone though. He often entices the reader into follow him down cerebral avenues where all his, and sometimes our, most peculiar psycho-sexual images and ideas hide. This book is a tribute to the unchecked thoughts, desires and innocent human emotions in all of us. If Pablo Neruda and a not-so-crass Charles Bukowski got together and wrote stories about Salvador Dali paintings while they watched Monty Python re-runs, it might start to sound a little like The Sadness of Sex.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Thought All The Great One's Had Already Been Written..., May 28, 1999

By	which road - See all my reviews

....I was wrong. The Sadness of Sex is the most engrossing and beautifully written novel I have picked up in years. This should be a must read for anyone expecting to spend anytime on this planet...and if you don't see its beauty when you read it...read it again! And if you still are moved by it...have your pulsed checked!