|
Reviewed
by Jason Makansi
A
very good friend asked to read some of my fiction. “Go to the
Amazon Shorts Program, “ I said, “you can buy a
short story for the ridiculously low price of forty nine
cents.” So she did, and wrote back that she found the story
to be a wonderful piece of erotica. I hadn’t thought about
that. I hadn’t in fact thought much about erotica as a genre.
You know porn when you see it, or so the cliché goes. What
about erotica?
Every story in
this tantalizing collection has a sentence or phrase that rises like
Braille off the page to tickle the tips of your fingers. Within
seconds, you’re a goner. From Alicia Gifford’s Surviving Darwin:
…and
poor little Alex, his seat belt undone, becomes a Scud missile.
From Nelson
George’s, It’s
Never Too Late In New York:
“
She was petite, with skin the color of
ripe
tangerine.
Gifford’s
story will forever change a
guy’s nurse fantasy from one of sex to one of being poked
with the wrong hypodermic needle because
Nurses are in such
short supply that they can’t get rid of all of us
druggies…”
Anyone
that doesn’t know what
succulence lingers below a ripe tangerine’s skin should
probably join the Republican Party. From Tsaurah Litsky’s End
of the World Sex,
…I
wanted to be pierced,
penetrated, and drained.”
But,
hey, this is about sex. Sex
always pulls you in, right? Surely there’s a stiffer bar good
erotica has to clear.
For my money, Eric Albert’s story, The
Letters, should
be in
the dictionary as the definition of erotica. Reading about a high
school girl imaginatively seducing a male teacher without feeling in
the
least bit guilty or as if you’re somehow being tainted by
child porn, well, that’s a feat. She is so sure of herself,
so in control, you don’t once think of her as some victim or
something. In one passage in this story, the main character converts
her seduction dilemma into a math problem. We’re not dealing
with a dumb blonde bored at cheerleading practice here. No,
we’re dealing with someone like Scout from To Kill a
Mockingbird growing up in the 1970s. Trust me, you
won’t
forget this story.
Now, just
because every story has words that pull you in and every
story is worth reading, not every story is a great read. There are some
laggards. End of the
World Sex didn’t live up to the billing,
literally or in irony or metaphor. Plenty readable, just not striking.
Haddyar Copley-Woods’ The
Desires of Houses is quite
imaginative—inanimate objects want to be eroticized too, and
the author is happy to oblige. It didn’t do it for me, but
I’m gonna bet others would love this story. Susannah
Indigo’s The
Year of Fucking Badly sucked me in with
It’s
amazing how fuckable everyone looks when
you’re looking for people who aren’t.
The ending,
however, caused the load on my mental crane to begin
crashing to the ground.
Each story is
followed by a short statement by
the author about the story, where the idea came from, who inspires
them, how much is autobiographical, etc. I prefer a work to stand on
its own, but that’s just me. I’m also not fond of
our symphony conductor's latest penchant for talking to the audience
about the piece before he plays it. I wish art museums and galleries
would dispense with the incomprehensible, high-minded descriptions and
explanations adjacent to the work. But the author sketches come after,
so they don’t have to intrude on your reading of the piece if
you don’t want them to.
So, what have I
learned? Erotica is best understood as an organizing
principle. All of these stories are erotica and something else:
porno-erotica , humor-erotica, thriller-erotica, fantasy-erotica, even
the kind of erotica that comes with plain, boring love between a man
and a woman. I can’t say I’ll know it when I see it
next time, or even know if I’ve written it. But with few
exceptions, these stories make it easy to quit obsessing over the
definition and learn to love bondage in the literary sense.
Jason
Makansi is an
electricity industry consultant by day. He’s published
several short stories in Marginalia, Rainbow Curve, Arabesques Review,
Big Muddy, Mizna, and the Amazon Shorts Program. In June 2008, he
published, through John Wiley & Sons, his third non-fiction
book,
Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It
Means To You.
|
Publisher: Touchstone/ Simon & Shuster
Publication
Date:Feb
2008
Paperback/Hardback?
Paperback
First
anthology?: No
Editor
bio: Susie
Bright (also known as Susie Sexpert) (born March 25, 1958,
Arlington, Virginia) is a writer, speaker, teacher, audio-show host,
performer, all on the subject of sexuality. She is one of the first
writers/activists referred to as a sex-positive feminist. She has a
weekly program entitled In Bed with Susie Bright distributed through
audible.com, where she discusses a variety of social, freedom of speech
and sex-related topics. Bright co-founded and edited the first women's
sex-magazine, On Our Backs, "entertainment for the adventurous
lesbian," from 1984 to 1991. She founded the first women's erotica
book-series, Herotica, and edited the first three volumes. She started
The Best American Erotica series in 1993, which publishes to this
day.
Buy this book (used or
new) from:
AbeBooks
Amazon
BetterWorldBooks.Com
And...don't
forget your local booksellers and independent book shops! Visit IndieBound.org to find an independent bookstore near
you in the US
If
you liked this book you might also like....
Nicholson Baker "Vox"
Michel Houellebeqc "The
Elementary
Particles"
What
other reviewers thought:
GoodReads
|
