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SEDUCTIONS by Lonnie Barbach

SEDUCTIONS

Tales of Erotic Persuasion

edited by Lonnie Barbach

Pub Date: Jan. 4th, 1999
ISBN: 0-525-94462-1
Publisher: Dutton

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.