THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 1994
edited by Susie Bright
The biggest surprise in this second annual anthology of 20 stories is the turn away from the rough-trade emphasis of the inaugural collection. Whether the universally steamy relationships involve gays masquerading as straights (Leslie Feinberg), December/June romance (Abigail Thomas), pregnancy in the convent (Linda Hooper), a condom fetish (Michael Lowenthal), S/M explorations (Gerry Pearlberg), or party sex with aliens (Bernadette Lynn Bosky, in the longest and strangest selection), the stories are suffused with tenderness, fragility, pain, and loss. There's still more than a hint of slap and tickle, and slap, in the take-that tales of John Preston and Pat Califia, but even here there's an abiding interest in the connection between sexual experience and the other kinds of experience that make people interesting—a connection that makes most of these stories all the more erotic. (Literary Guild alternate selection)