Tuesday, July 05, 2011

The Mammoth Book of New Gay Er0tica edited by Lawrence Schimel

I won this book in the LGBT Reading Challenge hosted by Brighton Blogger. I rarely read erotica (though you can read my review of a collection of French language erotic haiku here) and it's not giving away any secrets to admit I'm not a gay man. So I'm not really the target audience for this book. Having said that I enjoyed most of the stories in this collection. There's a very wide range from a couple of stories which are almost pornographic in their concentration on sex to the exclusion of any real narrative and at the other end of the range there are some that have so little sexual content that they read more as romantic short stories rather than erotica. This range did get me wondering about how erotica is actually defined....

Some of the stories that I most enjoyed:

Alaska by Trebor Healy - a writer and teacher lives in Alaska for a while where he climbs trees, discovers himself and changes the life of a young man in the local community


Divide and Conquer by William J Mann - an outrageous soap opera of a story about a novel approach to healing broken family relationships

Two Hearts by David May - two lovers realise just how much they mean to each other, with more than a little help from their cat, Schrodinger.

The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica edited by Lawrence Schimel, published by Robinson


for the LGBT Reading Challenge

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