Here’s another entry in our wildly popular series of very short stories that can be enjoyed, start to finish, in less time than it takes to brew a cup of tea. This new anthology of pleasingly brief tales features contributions from some of the best writers of erotica today. While most of the stories feature heterosexual sex, Five-Minute Erotica also offers a good mix of fantasy situations, including lesbian encounters and ménages à trois.
A roster of Bay Area authors lends solid street cred to 15 original stories, but few deliver on the elusive noir premise of this new series. Following the success of Brooklyn Noir (2004), Akashic has launched a set of anthologies in which each story takes place in a distinct neighborhood in a different city. In his introduction, Maravelis perhaps overcomplicates the idea when he asks, “What happens when the history of a city begins to disappear? What happens to literature when it feeds upon the ruins of amnesia?” Most of the stories;by Alejandro Murguía, Kate Braverman and others;feel as if they were written for a general literary anthology, all good enough but hardly satisfying as noir. Contemporary noir titan Jim Nisbet especially disappoints, with a vaguely science fictional vignette about a futuristic suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. Saving the day, Domenic Stansberry and Eddie Muller deliver genuinely haunting noir fiction, Michelle Tea does a nice modern-day homage to the form, and Peter Plate nails down the violently absurd Willefordian side of the genre with a tale about a Bad Santa knocking over a pot club.
Manhattan, mid-80s: Madonna is wearing her bullet-bra, and Wall Street is cash-happy, while at Chippendales – the world’s most famous male strip club – it’s raining men, and girls just wanna have fun. David Henry Sterry was at the centre of the madness as the roller-skating emcee, fanning the flames of lady lust while Rome burned.
Ultimately, though, all great parties must come to an end, and the gangland-style assassination of his boss, the man responsible for the phenomenal success of the beefcake boys, marked the beginning of the end for the party-all-the-time 80s in New York City.
“Sterry writes with comic brio … [he] honed a vibrant outrageous writing style and turned out this studiously wild souvenir of a checkered past.”
– Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Većina nas ne može ni zamisliti kako je kada ti plaćaju za seks. Ni sedamnaestogodišnji David Sterry to nije znao, sve dok 1974. god. nije krenuo na holivudski koledž. Za samo nekoliko tjedana počeo je raditi kao dobro plaćeni žigolo, a Mlado meso je izvrsna kronika tog iskustva.Kao sin sjevernoengleskih imigranata koji su u Americi htjeli ostvariti novi život, Sterry je u priču o sezoni provedenoj ‘pružanjem usluga’ imućnim ženama utkao i sjećanja na gotovo savršeno djetinjstvo.
Sasvim istinita, neodoljivo zabavna, često škakljiva, ova knjiga je jedan od najneobičnijih i najdirljivijih prikaza djetinjstva i adolescencije, ali i jasan podsjetnik koliko je granica između normalnog i devijantnog ponašanja tanka.
