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Of The Flesh:
Praise for Of the Flesh: Dangerous New Fiction
"Greg Wharton's distinguished roster of invitation-only contributors aren't merely adding danger to sex, they're recognizing the inherent danger native to every union of the flesh, the risk all of us take on when we take off our clothes and embrace. That danger arises from who we are, what we need, from the basic nature of physical relationships. Wharton notes, 'Many stories came in dealing with the very concept of sexuality itself being the danger.'"
"Used to be that any old smut could come together to form a functional erotic anthology; but where a decade ago there might be a half dozen collections a year, now there are that many a month, and so a core theme—rough stuff, hard drives, faster pussycats, virgins no more—helps distinguish a book. Editor Wharton, who oversees the edgy webzine www.suspecthoughts.com, hit on "danger" as his motif; and he delivers—the stories, queer and bi and trans-gendered and straight, tackle the theme with generous variety and uncommon ability. Better yet, the 20 tales, the result of invitation-only submissions, are no monotone of sex-in-dangerous-places work (though a couple, notably horehound stillpoint's sassy "A Street With a Deal" and Simon Sheppard's tense "The End of the World", tackle that topic with flair), or sex-with-dangerous-people work (though, again, Marshall Moore's disturbing "Notes on a Disappearance" and Sean Meriwether's dark "Marking Territory" flirt outrageously with that concept). Instead, there's a gratifying breadth of nimble, evocative writing, including Carol Queen's chatty exploration of extrasensory power, "Blowjob City", and doll yoko's chilling killing in "River Boys", or M. Christian's "Utter West", a feverish fantasy, and Thomas S. Roche's hard-on slapstick, "House Call on Beverly". Many of the stories are vignette-length, or at best briefs (Including a poignant kick-ass poem by Emanuel Xavier, "Nearly God"), no less accomplished for their brevity; but the high-quality collection is anchored by two of the longer contributions, "Memento Mori" by Ian Phillips and "Spunk" by Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco, about as different in tone as they could be, the first the work of a tight-prose stylist, the second expressed in the loose vernacular of a writer for whom English is a second language-but each touches on lust, obsession, and the dangerous moods of need with exquisite intensity, a quality which infuses Wharton's accomplished anthology."
"One of the most literary-minded collections we've read in a long time. The book is filled with dangerous, delicious and sexy short stories. Definitely a cut above and different."
Of The Flesh:
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