With every new year that passes, erotic writing becomes more varied and exciting. A veritable explosion of talent and imagination has become a sheer torrent over the past decade since I began compiling erotic stories in the Mammoth series to a most gratifying response.
While some of the best writers in our curious field continue to sustain high levels of fascinating readability, confirming the fact that an erotic story is not just a succession of pointless sex scenes or pretentious mood pieces evoking past couplings or emotions, new magazine pieces and anthologies continue to unveil great new talents and a dazzling repertory of sexual and psychological variations that talk to us most intimately and connect with our complicated psyche in ways that surprise and delight.
Yet again this past year, erotic writing in web magazines has proven a great, fertile area of discovery, much of it progressing into print in collections here and elsewhere. Sadly, this is very much due to the scarcity of print magazines that might offer a showcase for erotic writing as opposed to an incredible flowering of themed anthologies. As in other popular culture genres, such as crime and mystery or science fiction and fantasy, it’s in the magazines that new talent can find its feet, experiment and establish itself, and one can only regret the fact that innovative projects like NERVE or LIBIDO have moved off the news-stands and returned to the sheltering harbour of the worldwide web.
With every further volume in our series, I have effortlessly managed to uncover new voices in England, America, Australia, Canada and beyond. The present collection is no exception and unveils a handful of writers, all precious new voices who walk the delicate tightrope between the excesses of sheer titillation and the delights of sensuality with precocious assurance. I am confident we will see many more stories from most of them. My only regret, as ever, is the fact that I am unable to bring you voices from other languages in translation, due to financial imperatives; there is a goldmine of erotic writing in contemporary France right now which deserves a larger audience, and no doubt too in other countries (The Mammoth Book of International Erotica offered many such writers some years back but has since been overtaken by new generations of compelling foreign writers).
At any rate, I hope you enjoy the 2001 vintage of erotic writing collected in these hefty pages. As vintages go, it’s a guaranteed classic. As ever, the combinations, characters, relationships and ideas defy taboos and the normal sexual smorgasbord with pleasure and elegance, as over 40 writers balance lust and sensibility with wonderfully innovative tales which leave little to the imagination and tease and please in exquisite ways. However sexually knowledgable the reader might think he or she is, I am convinced there will be some surprises and gentle shocks along the road, and maybe some of what you read here will change your life in subtle ways, leaving a germ in your heart or loins to linger and grow insidiously and improve your quality of life in curious ways.
Here’s to the sexual imagination!