THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA 1999

Bright’s most recent annual (her sixth) numerically skips 1998, but only because it’s being printed six months earlier than usual in order to be on sale after Valentine’s Day 1999. Bright’s choices, as ever, represent the most literate erotica, and yet all the entries by her 20 authors are written, curiously enough, in speaking voices. Her own charmingly beswizzled introduction tells of her travails as an erotica editor (the last page of each volume is for reader’s criticism, to be mailed back to her) and of her surprise at readers’ choices of best story for each volume (and their enthusiasm for certain types of titillation). Herself a lesbian mother, as related in her soulfully funny autobiography, Susie Bright’s Sexual State of the Union (1997), she declares that while each story must pass the “wet test,” pleasing all readers is just hopeless. Some don—t want any more gay sex, others want more lesbo, some want men with extra large penises, others no more yucky blood, some want to can the fatties, while still others want plain old heterosexual intercourse—a diversity that’s apparently unsatisfiable. Whatever, all the pieces in the new volume are reprints from books or magazines published in 1997. The standout is an excerpt from Elise D—Haene’s first novel, Licking Our Wounds, which describes what happens when the female narrator, at age 12, first reads Portnoy’s Complaint. Also amusing is Kelly McQuain’s tribute to the late Bob Kane and Donald Bartbelme, “Je T—aime, Batman, Je T’adore,” about Robin’s crash on Batman’s pecs and the bump of the safety cup sewn into his shorts. Keri Pentauk asks “Is Your Husband Obsessed with On-Line Pornography?” and suggests punishments. Primal release? No. But silky stuff that will pass the test, at least for younger readers.