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Erotic Travel Tales
- edited by Mitzi Szereto
$14.95
ISBN 1573441376
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Susannah Indigo
(02/27/02)
Once I fell madly in lust with three different people during a trip to England, a short vacation where I had every intention of spending lots of time by myself exploring and learning, and was sure I had no interest in new lovers, since I thought I was happily involved back home. There was a fellow tourist from the States, a magician from a dinner banquet at the Tower of London, and a passionate soul from Kuwait, all of them appearing unexpectedly in my life to easily seduce the erotic side of my ongoing wanderlust. I was so (happily) tired, and things got so complex by the end of my stay, that I couldn't wait to get back home from my vacation to rest.
Travel can do that to you, and nowhere is it described more delightfully than in Mitzi Szereto's anthology, Erotic Travel Tales. Just looking at the gorgeous cover of this book can incite instant wanderlust -- a beautiful woman undressing (on clean sheets, of course!), her bed possibly floating down the canal toward what we know are fabulous cafes full of exotic men and women like she's never known before, all of whom might seduce her and show her the time of her life. I'm keeping the book propped up near my desk, the better to dream and remember to check travelocity.com more often.
Not all of the stories are travel stories -- some are just set in specific locales, with a strong sense of place permeating the tales. One of my favorites is "Journey of My Hands" by Gerard Wozek, the story of a newly-arrived American man in Paris who finds it much more interesting and profitable to offer his services as a "masseur" in a gay French/English newsletter than to teach part-time English, the better to learn Paris from "the inside out." He travels around the city, he learns, he becomes a walking Plan de Paris, able to provide directions even to French residents, and becomes so involved that he forgets to find time to get to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. His journey across "the skins of Paris" often involves much more than a simple massage:
He slipped off his silky pajama bottoms and lay down atop the wide table completely naked. I was then instructed to dress the physician as though he was a turkey being made up for an American Thanksgiving feast. Borrowing a technique for making truffles memorized from when I subscribed to Martha Stewart, I began to line his navel and chest with dried apricots and figs. I drizzled a warmed spigot of maple syrup over his legs and thighs, placed caramel pecan clusters in his eye sockets, and squirted a pastry bag of cookie dough around the base of his scrotum. As my hand rubbed the sticky syrup over the doctor's rising shaft, he dusted himself with powdered sugar -- and quickly came in a delirium of decadent sweetness.
Leaving Paris and heading to Japan, Ann Dulaney transports readers into the finest story of the anthology, a breathtaking peek into a traditional Japanese household of the past, where the wife, Mitsuko, works very hard to serve a perfect dinner and please her husband's boss, Mr. Miyataki, so that her husband might be promoted. As the dinner progresses, things become just a bit untraditional:
After some time, Mr. Miyataki decided he could no longer tolerate waiting for Mitsuko to expel the food from her body before she fed it to him. He took to placing bites of food inside her himself, and then, positioning his lips directly over her, sucked the little treasures into his own mouth. This seemed to give them both such exquisite and almost unbearable delectation that Mitsuko's body began to quiver from head to toe. Like a good homemaker, she rejoiced in the pleasure she was able to offer her dinner guest, but also, Mr. Miyataki's lips and tongue were skillful, as any general manager's should be.
Departing Japan, we stop in Kiev, Venice, the Sahara, Athens, the Amazon, Barcelona, Toronto, New York, New Orleans, and more, until our wanderlust is either sated or fully aroused. Finally we arrive in San Francisco, with the final cute and funny story, "Lilly's Loulou," which offers one of the best opening lines around, requiring you to read the book to find out the rest:
My Mistress abandoned me over a Chinese restaurant....
©2001 by Susannah Indigo
Reader
Comments
Susannah Indigo is the editor-in-chief of
Clean Sheets, and also the editor and founder of Slow Trains. She is the author of Oysters Among Us: erotic tales of wonder and the co-editor of
the anthology From Porn to Poetry: Clean Sheets Celebrates the Erotic Mind. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Erotica 2000, Herotica, and Best Women's Erotica. She is also a contributor to Salon Magazine. See her Web site for more information.
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