Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barbach, best known for the blockbuster For Yourself, offers up a third anthology (The Erotic Edge: Erotica for Couples) of 20 tales of sex and fantasy. Her scope is widea variety of ages, races and orientations appearand the results decidedly mixed. Barbach's self-help-style introductions to the stories and the collection's first two offerings are skippable. More engaging is Doraine Poretz's "Only in the Movies." Set in the Deep South of the 1960s, the story addresses prejudice and social taboo as it charts eight years of an interfaith relationship. Another standout, Dave Clarke's fairy tale "Nothing to Wear," tells of a woman who is whisked away from Bloomingdale's by a sultan's son and finds herself in an exotic land, where her outfit proves that less is more. The temperature rises with Kate Fox's nicely plotted, erotic "Knowing," an unusual coming-out story with several surprises. Agent, Rhoda Weyr. Literary Guild selection; Doubleday Book Club featured alternate. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sheaf of sex aids by 20 unknown writers, mostly for women but also for men and in particular for couples. Want to spend a night with your wife's best friend? Well, in Edward Buskirk's "The Other Woman," you can have your cake and eat it too, especially if that "other woman" who has slipped into your pitch-black bedroom is your wife disguised as her best friend. Or might it really be the best friend? James will never know, but the reader has some mild titillation watching the poor man go all the way and walk off guiltless. Barbach (The Erotic Edge: Erotica for Couples, 1994) avoids literal pornography (well, that depends) in these pinch-my-bottom little bed romps, while drawing the reader into story after story. Her intros to her five types of seduction fall into the deathslump of phrases like "attractive personality attributes in a potential partner"--which is artfully seductive writing only for sociologists, though the writers here are no better ("his manhood grew, straining against the confinement"). The five types, meantime, weave through dance, the unknown, escape, the environment, and the dark side. Barbach's writers often publish their erotica pseudonymously, and one can see why, with each story as elegantly sexy as salt-water taffy. One could do worse with one's mate than read this, but taking a shower together will get you there faster, and maybe with better prose. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
