Reviewed by Bill Noble
(03/14/01)

In our bedroom, we have three long shelves of erotica, some of it going back thirty years. The bedside end of the upper shelf is reserved for special favorites, among them Lonnie Barbach's Pleasures, the groundbreaking first collection of women's erotica, David Steinberg's Erotic by Nature, and a little one-shot 1988 publication from Idaho, of all places, called the Field Guide to Outdoor Erotica. Every two years, about one book joins this exclusive club, and the latest addition is Marcy Sheiner's Best Women's Erotica 2001.

She held her lips open so that I could photograph the velvet inside. I tried to coax her clit into the picture, but overworked and camera-shy, it hid stubbornly beneath its hood. Still, she was beautiful, different in every frame. Click. I held the camera in my right hand and took a picture of my finger on her clit, deep inside her. My finger here. There. Two fingers. Click. Click.

This passage is from the first story in the book, Infidelities by G. L. Morrison. The plot line is ordinary enough -- delicious, yet nothing to write home to Mom about -- but the writing is relentless and white-hot. That is what is distinctive about this volume: sophisticated, mature writing, triggering your gray matter with surgical intent.

Erotica is coming of age. The genre has always had fine writing, of course, but it has been an occasional thing, often from mainstream writers who have come to visit. More and more, though, our best writers are homegrown. The bar -- for the prose itself, for plot, for character, for quality of thought, for animal heat -- has been steadily raised, and this book is one of the results.

"There cannot be a child from this union," he said.... She watched him roll [the condom] down over his penis. The sight of him touching his own flesh sent sparks through the bud of her sex and she forgot the regret of having to be separated from his seed. She forgot everything except the length of his body against hers, his hands sliding beneath her buttocks, lifting and parting her cheeks as he drew her closer, his penis jutting forward, seeking to open her.

Lisa Prosimo is an old friend from Zoetrope. Her story quoted above, Pilgesh, unfolds inside Orthodox Judaism in the U.S. Rachel, its protagonist, breathless with erotic immersion, yet aching from her imprisonment, seems powerless against the weight of her community's iron conservatism. Her own power is hidden until the last electric words of the story tumble out.

Susannah Indigo, our Clean Sheets editor, gives us an elusive, phosphorescent story called The Language of Snakes. Its protagonist, who never speaks, is named bluenote:

He. . . removes every stitch of clothing and stands naked in front of her, trying to hold her close, but she keeps slithering away, dancing, running her hands through her hair and down her body, dipping her fingers into her pussy and licking them clean. She moves like a belly dancer but he has no real hips to speak of, nothing much to hold onto as she twirls around him and lands at his feet. Looking up at him with those eyes, she begins to climb up his body, wrapping around his legs, kissing and licking her way up and around from his cock to his ass and back again.

One piece astonished me, even on second reading. It's called After Loss, by Tabitha Flyte. There might be a way to squeeze more emotion and raw intensity from her words, but I have no idea how. Listen:

I wondered how we compared sister to sister. Did we taste the same? Would we come the same? He licked and licked and I moved, rocking against him, making his face so wet that he had to pull away and wipe himself. And then he was back, determined, vibrating my clit, tongue and fingers, fingers and tongue, and I was cunt-up, eaten up, losing it, losing him. I thrust against his licking face, mad for it. The orgasm stole through me, big shudders followed by little ones.

I gauge the quality of an anthology by the marks I make on the contents page: little ticks for "good," exclamation points for "great!" I am picky: a good book usually has three or four ticks. My copy of Best Women's... has more than half its stories marked, several with double exclamation points. The book's twenty-two pieces include several stories from Clean Sheets, including Sukreshwara, a lush fantasy by founding Fiction Editor Kris Hawes, a handful more by other CS authors you'd recognize, quite a few by the "greats" of the genre, one by a prominent romance writer, a story about disability and sex that'll leave you gaping, and a cheeky little piece by Mary Anne Mohanraj that is guaranteed to produce heat and a belly laugh.

Carol Queen has a disturbingly real story about suburban love rediscovered. It ends as you might end with this lovely book, lust resolved, step elastic, the rest of your evening waiting with a smile: "After dinner they put on jackets and take their wineglasses out to the garden." As for us, we will set the book on the chair beside our bed, turn out the light, and stalk each other beneath the covers.

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