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THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 2007

Name: THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 2007
Author: Susie Bright
ISBN: 0-7432-8962-5

edited by Susie Bright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2007

Another year, another celebration of sex.

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Sexologist Bright’s annual paean to the more physical aspects of love.

Since the Internet has affected every aspect of life in the 21st century, it’s no surprise that several of the 23 stories in Bright’s 14th anthology feature it. These include Dennis Cooper’s contribution, an excerpt from his novel, The Sluts, which tells the story of a gay-for-pay hustler named “Brad” through successive customer reviews on a hook-up site, and Alexander Chee’s “Best Friendster Date Ever,” which charts the progress of an online connection that takes on a (very) physical dimension. Six of the entries this year are excerpts from literary novels. There is Kathryn Harrison’s Envy, in which a young patient seduces her psychiatrist (who turns out to be her father); Jessica Cutler’s The Washingtonienne, featuring a cocaine-fueled threesome; Alicia Erian’s Towelhead, offering a look at make-up sex; and Daniel Duane’s A Mouth Like Yours, in which a tenth-grade boy’s dream comes true right under the nose of his girlfriend’s father. Not all the stories possess the same level of skill, but most match Bright’s exuberantly positive attitude toward sex. Among the best of those are Susan St. Aubi’s “Taste,” in which two late-night bakers treat each other to secret delicacies, and Susan DiPlacido’s “Heads-Up Poker,” featuring a strip-poker game where every player comes up a winner. Inevitably, there are entries that push so far into sexual fantasy that it becomes difficult to suspend disbelief. Some of the too-blue-to-buy stories include Nicolas Kaufmann’s “Comeback” and Marie Lyn Bernard’s “What Happened to That Girl.” It is the imbalance of collecting gorgeously sensuous writing with genre claptrap that is this anthology’s weakness and its strength. The great writing shows the hackneyed slap-and-tickle prose in the worst possible light. But to exclude the latter would be to deny part of the diversity and proclivity of human sexuality. And Bright has always known that.

Another year, another celebration of sex.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007

ISBN: 0-7432-8962-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006

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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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

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NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.