Susie Bright Presents

Introduction

Get in, get out, don't linger.

It sounds like a pornographic maxim, but it's actually Raymond Carver's axiom about how to craft the perfect short story. Erotic literature, in our lifetimes, has usually fit his bill. It's short, all right. Sexy stories have typically been told in punch lines, bawdy tales, quickies from a raconteur. I've seen erotic anthologies that proposed to tell a story in under a hundred words, then under fifty. Erotic storytellers have beaten the devil, then the censor, and finally the clock.

There's an untold parable behind the quick and the hot. Sexual writing has suffered under a lot of shame, and that's made it difficult to thrive. In a great deal of America's publishing history, you had to be a beatnik or a pornographer to get your hands on any form of erotica, whether crude or existential.

A couple decades ago, when commercial literary publishers began to produce erotic volumes of their own, they did so with two caveats. First, the movement was led ... read full excerpt from: Susie Bright Presents: Three the Hard Way: Erotic Novellas by William Harrison, Greg Boyd, and Tsuarah Litzky ebook