THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 2001

Name: THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 2001
Author: Susie Bright
ISBN: 0-684-86914-4

edited by Susie Bright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001

As with a photo album whose every picture dissatisfies some member of the family, every user returning to this volume after...

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The eighth in Bright’s series of hit-or-miss pillow books has a little something for everybody, but not much of anything for anybody.

Noting in her Introduction how far the genre has come since her 1993 inaugural volume, which could have been titled The Only American Erotica, the editor cites the explosion of erotic fiction on the Web—a phenomenon that makes contemporary erotica “the fastest-growing fiction genre ever seen.” Given the endless fields she’s gleaning, however, the 22 stories chosen as the most “arousing yet literary” of their kind are a disappointing lot. It’s not just that the sort of literary values you might associate with the O. Henry Prize winners are in short supply, or that the most obviously literary stories (with the happy exception of Charles Flowers’s sharp, funny boxing memoir) aren’t very successful as either lubricant or lit. What turns some readers on (Todd Belton’s prodigiously expanding breasts, Cara Bruce’s exotic dancer seduced by a female client, Dodie Bellamy’s adventures of a woman who really is from Venus, James Williams’s paean to “Jason’s Cock”) will send others looking for greener pastures. As in earlier volumes, the leading principle of selection here, pace Bright, isn’t “sincerity” but variety; Bright seems determined to leave no sexual preference or practice unrepresented, and the result reads less like The New Yorker than like National Geographic. There’s masturbation (Matt Bernstein Sycamore), serial sex (Damian Grace), sex before waking (Hanne Blank), sex professionals (Nathan Englander, Wendy Becker, M.J. Rose), hopeful young love (Dani Shapiro), remembered old love (Jack Murnighan), and the usual generous helping of gay, lesbian, and interracial couples and multiples.

As with a photo album whose every picture dissatisfies some member of the family, every user returning to this volume after the initial survey can expect to reread one or two stories devotionally and ignore the rest.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-684-86914-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SANTA CRUZ NOIR
edited by Susie Bright

- BOOK REVIEW
BIG SEX, LITTLE DEATH
by Susie Bright

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BEST OF BEST AMERICAN EROTICA, 2008
edited by Susie Bright

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.