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SEDUCTIONS

Name: SEDUCTIONS
Author: Lonnie Barbach
ISBN: 0-525-94462-1

TALES OF EROTIC PERSUASION

edited by Lonnie Barbach ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1999

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A sheaf of sex aids by 20 unknown writers, mostly for women but also for men and in particular for couples. Want to spend a night with your wife’s best friend? Well, in Edward Buskirk’s “The Other Woman,” you can have your cake and eat it too, especially if that “other woman” who has slipped into your pitch-black bedroom is your wife disguised as her best friend. Or might it really be the best friend? James will never know, but the reader has some mild titillation watching the poor man go all the way and walk off guiltless. Barbach (The Erotic Edge: Erotica for Couples, 1994) avoids literal pornography (well, that depends) in these pinch-my-bottom little bed romps, while drawing the reader into story after story. Her intros to her five types of seduction fall into the deathslump of phrases like “attractive personality attributes in a potential partner”—which is artfully seductive writing only for sociologists, though the writers here are no better (“his manhood grew, straining against the confinement”). The five types, meantime, weave through dance, the unknown, escape, the environment, and the dark side. Barbach’s writers often publish their erotica pseudonymously, and one can see why, with each story as elegantly sexy as salt-water taffy. One could do worse with one’s mate than read this, but taking a shower together will get you there faster, and maybe with better prose.

Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1999

ISBN: 0-525-94462-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EROTIC EDGE
edited by Lonnie Barbach

- BOOK REVIEW
GOING THE DISTANCE
by Lonnie Barbach & David L. Geisinger

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COLLECTED STORIES

by Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 31, 1984

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Twenty-six tales by the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner, rearranged in roughly chronological order of writing. From the 1968 collection No One Writes to the Colonel come stories of the town of Macondo—about the much-delayed funeral of local sovereign Big Mamma, a dentist's revenge on the corrupt Mayor (extraction sans anesthetic), a priest who sees the Devil, a thief who robs the pool hall of its billiard balls. But the collection's standout—its title novella—is not included here. Likewise, the long title piece from the Leaf Storm collection (1972)—also about a Colonel—is omitted; but it does offer "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and other beguiling fantasies. And, from 1978's Innocent Erendira And Other Stories comes an uneven mix of mystical fable and diffuse surrealism (some pieces dating, before English translation, from the 1940s or '50s). Much that's brilliant, some that's merely strange and fragmentary, and almost all enhanced by the translations of Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein.

Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1984

ISBN: 0060932686

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
UNTIL AUGUST
by Gabriel García Márquez ; translated by Anne McLean

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY
by Gabriel García Márquez edited by Cristóbal Pera translated by Anne McLean

- BOOK REVIEW
I'M NOT HERE TO GIVE A SPEECH
by Gabriel García Márquez translated by Edith Grossman

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TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

by Ernest Hemingway ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1937

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A somewhat puzzling book, but — all in all — it is good Hemingway, and a sure sale. Key West and Cuba form the settings for a tough story of men at the end of their tether, grasping at any straw, regardless of risk, to turn a few dollars. Rum-running, smuggling aliens, carrying revolutionary arms. Gangsters, rich sportsmen, sated with routine, dissipated women and men — they are not an incentive to belief in the existence of decent people. But in spite of the hard-boiled, bitter and cruel streak, there is a touch of tenderness, sympathy, humanity. Adventure — somewhat disjointed. The first section seems simply to set the stage — the story starting after the prelude is over. The balance forms a unit, working up to a tragic climax and finale. There is something of The Sun Also Rises,and a Faulkner quality, Faulkner at his best. A book for men — and not for the squeamish. You know your Hemingway market. His first novel in 8 years.