My story about being qa birethday present for an 82-year-old grandmother
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Category: Anthologies
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.
From Publishers Weekly
The authors of this punchy, graphic-filled guide understand that “in the rush to consume life, rather than live it … we sometimes lose sight of what’s important to us,” so they have created this inspiring guide to get readers thinking about what they would like to do with the time they’ve got left. In often stirring, one- or two-page essays, 30-something writers primarily from London and major U.S. cities share their own experiences fulfilling such dreams as “Help save an endangered animal,” “Ask out a total stranger,” and “Build something that lasts.” All 100 suggestions fall under the chapter titles Roots, Explore, Experiment, Challenge, Give, Learn, Express, Love, Work and Legacy, which keeps the tone from becoming too vacation-focused or self-indulgent. Some of the pieces suffer from amateur composition, but many more are inspiring in their simplicity and forthrightness. Thelma, a Californian, writes of a life-long pen pal in Yorkshire, England: “We are now both 71 years old and have kept this precious friendship together for nearly 60 years.” Also helpful are questions that prompt the reader to ponder what their life’s dreams really are (“Who in your life has surprised you with the chances they’ve taken?”; “Which period in history are you curious to know about?”). Though the concept behind the book is simple, it is well-executed and empowering.