Desert Isle Keeper
Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 6
Rachel Kramer Bussel’s annual collection of romanterotica has once again graced our Kindles, e-readers and bookshelves, and this collection is just as delightful as the last. I liked it rather better than the previous volume, as this one feels more consistent.
As always, the submissions involved vary, from a woman’s encounter with the town bad boy to a couple of empty nesters trying lifestyle-variety D/s. There’s a woman who hires a male prostitute to help her figure out her need to dominate, and a story about tattooing as a form of submission.
Romancelandia, of course, is well represented here. One of the best stories in the volume is Olivia Waite’s Cabinet of Curiosities, featuring two older bisexual heroines who finally explore their long-simmering fascination with one another. Zoey Castile pops in with a fun story about a woman and a man who hook up after a car accident.
The collection has one big weakness – a heavy lean toward D/s-themed stories. There are a thousand different kinks out there to explore, and the collection’s easy reliance upon one single interest tends to make the book repetitive. If you don’t have a huge interest in bondage only half the stories will appeal.
But then again, repetitive does not mean unoriginal. After all, this is also a book in which a woman breaks decades of veganism with a sausage and a wank (no – it’s not what you’re thinking!!) over the cute butcher she just met (Jane Bauer’s Meat Cute, written with enough sensuality and humor to anger up the blood of anyone who lives off of tempeh bacon.) and includes a story about balloon kink (Inflated Egos by Evie Bennet). There’s public sex and sex clubs, long-distance fucking and long-term yearning.
It’s the top talent that make this volume of the series stand out from the others, and makes it my favorite thus far, in spite of the repetitive subject matter.
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Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
Buy Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 6 ed. by Rachel Kramer Bussel:
Book Details
| Reviewer: | Lisa Fernandes |
|---|---|
| Review Date: | December 8, 2020 |
| Publication Date: | 12/2020 |
| Grade: | A- |
| Sensuality | Burning |
| Book Type: | Erotica |
| Review Tags: | Anthology review | AoC | bisexual | mild d/s | tattoo |
Thanks for the review, Lisa.
In regard to the high level of BDSM content, I wonder if that has to do with marketing. What I mean is, the advice veteran self-published erotica authors give to newbies on Reddit’s eroticauthors page is to not write vanilla stories if they want to make money. True, you can absolutely write a tender story with no BDSM elements or kinks, but it’s a much smaller market than targeting niches.
If you’re looking for an erotica anthology that boasts of variety, editor T.C. Mill of The New Smut Project published Erato: Flash Fiction this year. It contains 50 stories diverse in characters, settings, pairings, and situations, with no story longer than 2,000 words. Full disclosure: I haven’t read it, but one of my pieces made the longlist.
That’s possible!
Thank you for the rec!
“You’re welcome!” I hope you enjoy it.
The New Smut Project also has two other anthologies with longer stories and a Tumblr page explaining their mission to support “lyrical sentences that sing with meaning” and move away from “cookie-cutter fantasies full of purple prose, awkward dialogue, and characters who are completely two-dimensional–except for breasts, which are always double-D’s and whose description seems more important than their owner’s dialogue.” In short, the editors got frustrated with what was available in the marketplace and decided to start their own indie erotica project.
I remember when I read the submission guidelines and updates for Erato, the editors lamented they were getting too many generic Barbie and Ken-type characters in their slush pile. Without getting too graphic, they wanted some sexual variety that went beyond standard conventions. Not necessarily kinky even, just creative, consensual scenes that suited the characters rather than falling into the pattern of Slot A into Tab B. They hope to have other anthologies in the future, so I wish them luck.
Huh, I hadn’t heard of that collection, will check it out soon/
I’m not entirely sure if that’s true – I’m wondering if it’s just Popular Kinks AGogo.
I hope you enjoy it! I think a lot of AAR readers who have been lamenting the generic sex scenes in romance novels will like this curated collection that supposedly expands beyond standard conventions.
I also think 50 shades and it’s success (confession I haven’t read it because I couldn’t make it past the first few pages of crummy writing, not because of content) made BDSM more mainstream. Now I know 50 shades supposedly gets it really, really wrong according to people who know. I’m just saying that it made the idea of it more mainstream and acceptable due to its success and probably exposed it to many more people.
Also – I love getting the inside publishing scoop from you Nan. It’s interesting to get the “industry perspective”.
I think that’s absolutely true about Fifty Shades of Grey being the breakthrough book for BDSM awareness in the mainstream, despite its gross inaccuracies according to many in the lifestyle. I think it also mobilized kinky writers into action, publishing their own stories that demonstrated the culture more accurately- particularly in regard to consent and aftercare.
Like you, I couldn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey either because of the “crummy writing.” Plus, I’ve read warnings of stuff in there that sounds downright gross to me rather than sexy. The overall premise doesn’t grab me either. Fifty Shades does come up in discussions now and then on Reddit. Some authors lament, “Why, oh why does that substandard smut make so much money when I’m floundering?” But there’s also an instructive tone of, “Yes, it’s become a cultural cliché of bad writing, but James followed all the romance beats readers are looking for. Study them!” (BTW, no reading shame to anyone who enjoyed the book. It’s just not something I want to read.)
And I know we’ve discussed at AAR how Harlequin probably tried to jump on the BDSM bandwagon with their “Dare” line, but couldn’t make themselves go all the way, which is probably why it’s going defunct. I think it would take an extremely adept hand to strike the balance they seemed to want between kink and wholesomeness- if it’s even possible.
Incidentally, I think Harlequin also tried to snag the Twilight crowd with their relatively short-lived paranormal line “Nocturne.” I’ve never seen it mentioned at AAR, but I’d be curious to see what anybody thought. When the line closed, I heard some complaints from readers who said Nocturne was the only Harlequin line they read, but I’m guessing their faithful paranormal audience was too small to maintain the program.
Aw, thanks, Chrisreader. I’m more on the periphery of the system- think like a maverick B-list film director, only even less involved with the mainstream- but I hear things.
Coincidentally, I just saw that Nancy Friday’s 1973 classic of erotica, MY SECRET GARDEN, is a $2.99 Kindle Daily Deal. If you are a “woman of a certain age” (which I am), you will fondly remember this collection of women’s sexual fantasies. I still have my dog-eared copy from my teen years and, although I haven’t looked at it in years, I remember it being smoking hot and full of a wide variety of different types of fantasies. I think of MY SECRET GARDEN as being one of the three books (FEAR OF FLYING and SWEET SAVAGE LOVE being the other two) that opened the door for women writing and reading sexual-explicit material about women’s lives and journeys (sexual and otherwise) and helped create the Romancelandia of today. So, if you’re tired of erotica that seems to be heavily dependent on D/s & bdsm dynamics, you might want to give MY SECRET GARDEN a look, if only to see how things were done almost a half-century ago.
I read that in junior high school and haven’t thought about it since. There was a whole raft of books–The Happy Hooker, Coffee, Tea or Me, The Story of O–published in that era that were unrepentantly about women having and enjoying all kinds of sex. Those books offered a stellar counter narrative to the good girls don’t storyline we were told by our parents. I think that they paved the way for the incredible (and rather hilarious) success of Grease, the most sexually subversive family film ever!
I wish everyone would read Nancy Friday’s works as I think they are so important and eye opening, even today.
Obviously some cultural references are dated. I was recently reading her work on men’s fantasy and it was funny to see a man talk about his fantasies of Joan Kennedy! That’s a name you don’t hear in the news (or in conjunction with men’s fantasy lists) lately.
I think Friday is incredibly important in explaining that women’s fantasies don’t mean that they necessarily want these to take place in real life!! No mental shaming!!!