Bright, who doesn’t quite trust the literary merit of this year’s edition, appends a list of earnest study questions (“In...
Pop sexologist Bright (Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression, 1999, etc.) thinks this tenth annual collection marks a turning point because so many of the contributors have moved away from an autobiographical viewpoint to create characters whose sexual desires aren’t synonymous with their authors’.
Actually, the news is even better: This is the first of Bright’s anthologies whose 25 stories can’t be adequately categorized in terms of the characters’ sexual orientation, preferred position, or fetish. That isn’t to say that interested readers won’t find rough-trade gay males (Shaun Levin), drag queens (J.T. LeRoy, Poppy Z. Brite), gender-benders (Adelina Anthony), phone-sex pros (Laurie Sirois), crystal meth addicts (Gary Rosen), murderers (Pam Ward), skin divers (Simon Sheppard), oyster eaters (Debra Boxer), horse fanciers (Alma Marceau, Jane Smiley), gun molls (Lucy Taylor), late-night train passengers (Tsaurah Litzky), and mermaids (Francesca Lia Block) enjoying America’s favorite spectator sport. Most of these stories, however, find a new slant that isn’t reducible to a new thrill, and the best of them create a fullness of experience that goes beyond titillation. Ernie Conrick’s tale of the women’s tennis circuit comes so close to attaching real-life names to its fantasies that it gets a ghoulishly funny charge. The allegedly instructional monologues by Jamie Callan and Stacey Richter make sex sound both antiseptic and scary. Robert Devereaux’s warning about the dangers of simultaneous orgasm is provocative in more ways than one. And Michael Stamp’s fable of sex beyond the grave will touch readers whatever their sexual persuasion.
Bright, who doesn’t quite trust the literary merit of this year’s edition, appends a list of earnest study questions (“In ‘Homewrecker,’ Tina is a somewhat destructive and tumultuous force. Why is it that all the men in this town can’t seem to resist her?”). Ignore them unless you’re in a reading group, and savor an anthology that just might mark this outlaw genre’s coming-of-age.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86915-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
