edited by Susie Bright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2007
Another year, another celebration of sex.
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
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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