I won't make a habit of recommending erotic literature. First, you can look at Golden Clitorides
Award-winning stories, recent Rauxa prize
winners or the Desdemona Story
Contest Winners or the Alt.Sex Hall
of fame. Here are a few that stand alone as good stories:
-
Number Six is a
pseudonym for an erotic writer working along a similar vein to my own fiction
project. His project is called Psycho-Sexual Short Stories for the Slightly
Disturbed (PSSSFTSD). His tiny stories (in the strangely-named Global Village
Library) are frivolous, clever, silly, sly, light-hearted, slighty
naughty, and very imaginative. Number six has the ability to take ordinary
settings or situations (like a parent/teacher
conference! or a visit to a copy shop) and just make them outrageous. Some of the
stories have a magnificent terseness (see Threepeat or Yellow Rose).
Others are more experimental in nature (see the Thin Gray
Line). Despite the naughty/manipulative nature of these stories (see Coming Home ),
these stories are the best you're going to find in the erotic flash fiction
genre. These stories should be sipped like fine wine...slowly and in very small
amounts. They distill the erotic moment to a few sexy details and surprises,
with erotic twists and turns reminiscient of O'Henry or Kundera. The amount of
fiction (100+ stories) here is prodigious, yet their quality remains constant.
- It's not fiction, but this collection of essays about the meaning and importance of sexual
fantasies in healthy people is a valuable and insightful read.
- Lately I've been enjoying the erotica
ebooks by MC Radiance. Radiance is a musician/author/artist who was written several
imaginative and comic erotic tales. The Great Voyeur is a
remarkable autobiographical confession about his sex life which Radiance
narrates with wit and insight. Radiance selects a few erotic episodes from his
life and and brings them back to life. As crazy as these erotic adventures are,
they ring true to me and offer an interesting portrait of sexual mores in this
post-feminist age. What a fun read! The only other book I've picked up is P.S.I. Pressure, Sex &
Intuition which reminds me of Kerouac, Terry Southern or Tom Robbins.
- Free Erotica Ebooks I've been promising to make an ebook version of the 99 Erotic Notions project for over a year, and surely
I will get that done. In the meantime, here are some places you can find free ebooks. Feedbooks
has a free erotica ebook section and so does
Smashwords . I haven't had time to sample any of the free ebooks except for the MC Radiance titles,
but I'm sure there are gems waiting to be discovered.
-
Selena
Jardine writes a variety of erotic stories with nice twists, sensuous
moments and a surprising amount of humor. Think of de Maupassant writing scripts
for "Sex in the City." Although her acclaimed story Ruthie's
Hair fuses emotional scarring with physical desire, many of her other
stories are quick, frivolous and highly entertaining (see for example Anything You
Want or Make Me and Marital
Therapy). While some of the details are out there, the characters and
situations are plausible and relate to everyday experiences in an ongoing
relationships (getting pregnant, fantasizing about a long lost love, etc).
- Don't forget the
Unbuttoned Tales
section of this site. It showcases quality woman's erotica that I've
found over the years. By various female authors.
- The recent
Rauxa prize is an annual $1000 prize for an erotic story published in
the previous year. In 2005 the award went to Mike Kimera , a talented Irish
writer. His prize-winning story, Writing Naked:
Letters to Myself, is interesting and honest, but (in my opinion) not
necessarily his best. Still when when your goal is simply to portray sexuality
honestly, you sometimes trade titillation for psychological accuracy. (This is
not intended as a criticism). With other stories, Kimera is more adventurous:
the playfully naughty Happy Anniversary
(lust for sister-in-law), Newton's Law
of Emotion (adventures in physics), and Friday Night
at the Adult Bookstore (running into a friend in a very odd place).
Other more "honest" stories include: Last Taboo and the
Soft
Option. My favorite story, Photographic
Memory, like his prize-winning story, weaves past together with present
in unsettling ways. Not explicitly erotic, the story nonetheless examines the
issue of desire, time and fidelity in a way not necessarily abiding by the
strictures of marital fidelity. The story has a great line: "I will make your
beauty immortal." Immortal indeed. Many of his stories are collected in his recent book .
(Stories are mirrored here).
-
Remittance Girl is a prolific
Canadian short story writer now based in Vietnam. She writes in a variety of
styles and themes, with a slight emphasis on supernatural fantasy, Asian
settings and spanking/sexual submissiveness. I like her smart characters and
witty conversational style which borders on satire. Even when the stories have
dark erotic themes, reading them can be naughty fun. I've only started reading
her vast collection of
erotica stories. My favorite so far has been Succession, a
Japanese supernatural story (supererotica?) and Spy who Loved his wife
(an entertaining story about wife-swapping which is unfortunately offline). Normally, I don't get into
erotic novellas (it's hard to sustain the titillation for that long without
seeming ridiculous), but her Erotic Series seems
entertaining and scandalous enough to keep you reading. (So far, I've enjoyed The Dinner Party (a 9
part series) which has a bondage/submission theme). Also download her free erotica ebook Flash Me which contains flash fiction, poetry and
artistic photographs.
- Five Girls
by Riain Grey is remarkably evocative prose poem about sexual encounters. The
brevity of the story (which is really a series of 5 flash fictions) gives the
story an unusual amount of heat. (Take that Number Six!). I
don't count myself a fan of flash fiction in general (they are evocative, yes,
but hardly capture the sustained nature of the erotic imagination), but Grey has
done an excellent job in giving them a thematic (and stylistic) unity. Her web domain seems to be down, but she
keeps a Who I Want To Be weblog
with occasional updates and links to stories.
-
Tangerine
Magic by Inna
Spice is a lovely tale about a young girl's first encounter with sex and
love, as well as her ambivalent feelings towards desire (In an interview, Inna connects it to Stanislavski's "emotional memory," something we also see in her story
Love's
Arm). In her story Telephone Banking, the female character enjoys phone sex with telemarketers .Here's links to her other
stories. (August 2010 Update: Lots of these stories seem offline, so I'm linking to archived pages. By the time you look at
this page, her site may have been restored.
- Making Do by
W.S. Cross is a lovely threesome/love triangle tale told with a new
angle. She has been working on an erotica novel with a cerebral/academic theme
called Beyond You and Me.
Individual chapters are available online (see for example Chapter
1.).
-
Mary Anne Mohanraj started
out in erotic fiction, but over the years has experimented with lots of genres
and styles. Her early
stuff and earlier
stuff broached taboo erotic subjects, including mythology (Diana), prostitution
(Girl Behind the
Fantasy), lesbianism (Kali) and other
things. At the moment, her erotic sensibilities and evocative language are being
channeled into more traditional story subjects: her Sri Lankan heritage,
intercontinental romances and family sagas.
- The alternative sexualities in
Fantasy and SF booklet (also produced by Mary Anne Mohanraj) contains
an interesting list of fiction titles with erotic themes, along with helpful
annotations and commentary. Most of these titles are print books with a mild
emphasis towards gay/bi, but still an excellent reference guide.
-
Everyone Gets Lucky Once by LushUs
- True Porn Clerk Stories by Ali David is one of the funniest things I
have ever read. It's not really an erotic story, but a diary by a young actress
about working at a porn store. Interestingly, the actress later went on to
perform several of the stories here on Ira Glass's "This American Life". These
stories are not supposed to be arousing, but they are some of the funniest
things I've read. Unfortunately her stories are no longer online but available
for $10 on Amazon. But I've managed to find a single archived page of her original diary -- that will be enough to
give you a taste of what it's about. Here's the Livejournal of Ali Davis.
-
Golden
Touch by Vickie Morgan, a story with mythological overtones
-
That Obscure Desire by Jeffrey Eugenides. Literary coming of age.
- Desdemona's Fishtank is a
free writer's forum where members can read & critique other people's stories
or submit their own stories for review. They have quite a community thing going
on there, and many notable erotica writers hang out there.
- Also, I happily recommend Mammoth Book of Erotica edited by Maxim Jakubowski which is a
remarkable collection of high quality erotic stories (available at Amazon for
less than $5!). Jakubowski edits several series of erotic fiction, and quite
frankly, these volumes are pretty representative of the best in erotic fiction.
The volume I have linked to is particularly remarkable. Why? It contains a
series of short stories by Marco Vassi, "Carcass of Dreams" (also found in his
book Erotic Comedies ) which is quite simply the most brooding and
profound piece of writing I've ever seen. Eventually I plan to write a critical
essay about these stories.
- The weekly Clean
Sheets provides a great forum for a lot of new erotica writers even
though the quality fluctuates.
-
My Rose by Simple Man, a Lautremontesque rumination
-
Erotic fiction portals: The Erotic Woman has a substantial
collection of poetry and erotic
fiction. Lush Stories uses
the community rating system of a site like Digg to vote up or down certain
stories by genre. It's brand new, and an experiment well worth watching. The Erotic Writers and
Readers' Association has a vast amount of fiction in its archives; I
just haven't figured out where to start! Playfulbent offers a series of
collaborative erotic stories--a fascinating experiment worth watching.
- If you want to browse, try Kristen's list of free erotica sites by individual authors, random collections of erotic
stories or just a random
ASSTR writer (warning: gigantic page!) until you find something
palatable. Although ASSTR has lots of good writing, you'll notice that the
overwhelming majority of stories fixate on one fetish or taboo. Many stories use
story
codes and for those wanting a specific type of story, that can
help.
- Many "stroke stories" or "fetish stories" seem to revel in their own
degradation. Exploring such fantasies can offer illicit thrills, even if the
situations are implausible or the transgressions too awful or dirty to discuss
in polite company. It's important not to forget that fantasies have a dangerous
side, that the sexual imagination is not just the sanitized stuff you see in Sex
in the City or the softcore flick (don't get me wrong; I like the occasional Sex
in the City!). One reads partially for self-discovery; one asks, "Why do I find
X or Y arousing?" and "why does my libido enjoy fantasies about one night stands
or degradation or victimization when in real life I would find it so revolting?"
Take for example Nujbaf's stories about
female promiscuity and cuckoldry . They are not pleasant stories, and
characters rarely experience emotional fulfillment (with one or two exceptions).
Yet Nujbaf's stories describe how desire binds us to situations that inflict
emotional damage. In real life one usually breaks free from situations of
psychological self-destruction. But in fiction, one can linger on arousing
situation without turning into actual accomplices or victims. Nujbaf's stories,
like other stroke stories, focus on how a situation or context causes people to
lose normal inhibitions (and in a sense, all erotica seems dedicated to
envisioning such carnal contexts--see for example Justin Hall's actual description of a proto-sensory sexual event).
- Despite using a pseudonym, I am a little ashamed to admit sometimes to enjoying
stories dealing with taboos, wild promiscuities and rather shocking age
differences. This shame comes with the territory. If I had to list all the
stories I'd read about lecherous college teachers or high school cheerleaders or
teen shoplifters caught in the act or foreign exchange students or first time
lesbians at summer camp or underage prom parties or sorority initiations or
adventurous babysitters or daughters kidnapped while on vacation in a foreign
country or sexual conquests in cyberspace, the result would truly be astounding.
No aspect of growing up or coming of age remains untouched by the erotic
writer's inspiration, leaving the adult reader to almost view his or her youth
as a series of missed opportunities. No TV show or female celebrity
will escape the quill of an erotic writer's pen (not even
Seinfeld!). Quentin Tarrentino once remarked that he knew his films had
finally become an official part of pop culture when they were parodied in porn
videos. These stories aim first and foremost to lodge permanently in memory.
After reading enough erotic stories, a person is inclined to hold nothing
sacred, to have a jaded nostalgia about the time
when events or situations were devoid of erotic subtexts .
-
Story of O by Pauline Reage is considered a classic erotica text of
submission and devotion. It is also lovely (and sad) writing. As much as I enjoy
the novel as a work of fiction, its dreamlike setting and subdued narrative make
the story more sexy but less relevant to real life. The above link is to a text
link which could go offline any day. Check this this waybackmachine link if it does.
- The stories on thefirsttime.com are
not particularly literary (I doubt they are destined to appear in the annals of
great erotic literature), but I like the idea behind it. Submit a true erotic
story, and then you receive membership to access the site. Often it seems that
people just plaguarize stories from other sites to get membership, but quite a
lot of them have the feel of authenticity. Reading a site like this makes it
clear how some erotic writers have a compulsion to write about every single
sexual escapade in their life (real and imaginary). Their purpose is simply to
capture on paper (or a web page ) the fantasies before they fade away. In
contrast, my approach here is to write with more reflection. For every
interesting erotic notion there are probably 99 (or 99,000) other notions, more
prosaic, less interesting, less entertaining to read. Here you only see the most
interesting or literary or thoughtful. However, occasionally it is fun to read
the random story by the random ordinary Joe Schmoe (or Johanna Shmoe).
- Although ASSTR is probably the biggest, there are a lot of free erotic story
sites on the web (causing one to wonder why would actually pay for erotic
stories at all!). I'm also partial to a review site, Jane's Guide
that does one page reviews of free and pay adult sites.
- Erotic blogging seems to be a relatively new phenomenon, and Erosblog seems to be the most literary.
Bacchus and Aphrodite reads a combination of stuff about sex (fiction, essays,
how-to's, male/female psychology), and it is always refreshing to see what's
new. Significantly, Erosblog keeps a pretty hefty blogroll of other sexy
writers, including Violet Blue's tinynibbles (She maintains an admittedly indiscriminate list of eroticblogs
on del.icio.us). Among other things, Ms. Blue writes/edits for adult
film publications. The relatively highbrow Fleshbot covers sex and pop culture, commenting more on the visual
arts, sexual gadgets and porn world. This blog always seems to be the first to
sniff out celebrity scandals, Internet novelties and and trends in sexual mores.
Nowadays many erotic writers are using weblogs as public confessionals for their
sexcapades, both real and imagined. The thrill of these weblogs come from the
fact they exist in real time and have a whiff of reality to them. (It is not
surprising that Maxim Jakubowski has come out with a new anthology of sex diaries ). Many of these weblogs have public
comment sections, making it possible to engage with the person behind the
weblog.
-
Audio erotic stories-- what a concept! We are used to reading
our erotic fiction in silence, and yet, as audio fiction and podcasts become
more popular, we may end up hearing erotic stories instead of reading them.
There's not a lot of audio erotic fiction on the net (and definitely not for
free), but the best place to start is mp3s of Mary Anne Mohanraj reading
her own erotic fiction (be sure to give her a tip!). A group
of readers/peformers led by Ace McLeod are producing Stories on Mp3s from the
ASSTR collection. They are recording classics by Dulcinea , Frank Downey and Nick Scipio . The recordings are
high quality and consist of male/female voices, so they are delights to hear.
What I've heard (so far) is not sexually explicit, but really, some kinds of
erotic writing just don't translate well into spoken form, so I'll give them the
benefit of the doubt. Will report back. Many mainstream novels are sexually
explicit though one wouldn't think of them as being erotic fiction. Recently I
heard the sensuous Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber and sexually deviant
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian in midday traffic. These books on tape
(available for sale at amazon) are every bit as explicit as other stuff,
although one wouldn't normally think it based on reviews. Unfortunately, both
audio books are not free, but Bernardo's House
(mp3) by sci fi writer Jim Kelley is a free download, read by the author
himself. If anyone can recommend free audio erotic stories, please drop me a
line. I just started listening to SonicErotica, a free collection of audio stories read by women with
sexy voices. Actually, these are not so much stories in the conventional sense,
but first person fantasy accounts of sexual experiences. I've only started
listening, but what I've heard so far is well-done.
- Recently I've been doing a literary study of Marco Vassi, and
I hope to publish on this website a critical introduction to his literary works.
He's a giant in the erotica field, and unfortunately he seems totally overlooked
in this Internet era. At the moment a single story exists on the Internet by
Marco Vassi, titled The
Conscientious Cukold (it's more of a stroke story than a literary one) .
So far, must reads by Vassi include Other Hand Clapping (meditation +
acting + jealousy + marital fidelity), In Touch (radical somewhat
satirical story of a psychotherapist who uses sex and orgies to cure people's
psychological problems), Sensual Mirror (love triangles and
sensuality), Mind Blower (virtual worlds, psychology experiments and
violation of taboos), Gentle Degenerates (promiscuity), and Erotic
Comedies (surreal erotic stories) .
- It's not erotica, but I found the sarging field reports of this random forum poster named Tihash to be
fascinating. It the daily journal totaling five years of entries of a real
person trying to pick up women. I wouldn't call the person a Don Juan, but his
journals are frank and realistic – even a little sad. I've read half of
the entries so far and found them absorbing. I learned a lot too (and recognize
parts of my own personality in it, alas!). There are 246 entries, all of them
fascinating! by the way, the SoSuave discussion forums are a good way to learn about techniques of
seduction from others in the field. Unlike other seduction communities, the
people here are genuinely well-behaved and thoughtful.
- I don't spend a lot of time keeping up with the Seduction Commmunity, but the
Mystery Method is a classic handbook for meeting women. Just remember
that this is one method and may not necessarily work for you. The key thing is
learning Mystery's approach to the problem. (Personally I find Mystery's
approach somewhat demeaning and one that works in bars and clubs only). For a
more erudite treatment of the subject, see Robert Greene's Art of Seduction. Greene explains seduction strategies for different personality types, then he presents historical and literary
examples of how these strategies have worked. A little mechanistic, but still a fun read.
- The Mind Caviar erotica
ezine) contains a good amount of fiction and essays on erotic themes.
-
Does one of the Internet addresses here not work? You can let me know. Also,
the waybackmachineusually
lets you find stories that have been removed or taken offline.
Updated August, 2010.