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OverviewThis book is a blend of autobiography and fiction that presents a portrait of sexual excess. A blistering new collection from literary rising star Stephen Elliott demonstrating once again why his books have been praised as graceful, soaring, and fearless . As with all of Elliott's work, these stories have the raw ring of truth filtered through the author's downbeat-poetic sensibility. My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats me up follows the narrator on a dizzying ride through past and present, from a group home for troubled adolescents in Chicago where he loses his virginity to shooting galleries and homeless encampments in San Francisco where he searches for deeper and darker thrills. In Other Desires, a flood of unsettling memories backgrounds the narrator's involvement with a loose-knit family of lost souls. Tears explores the disturbing complexities of an S/M internet hook-up. Several of the stories feature the enigmatic Eden, the narrator's polyamorous mistress. With My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats me up , Elliott confirms his status as a major young writer of a kind of literary fiction that recalls the work of Genet and Bukowski. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Stephen Elliott (Stephen Elliott)Publisher: Cleis Press Imprint: Cleis Press Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 1.10cm , Length: 20.30cm ISBN: 9781573442558ISBN 10: 1573442550 Pages: 168 Publication Date: 10 February 2006 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsHappy Baby is surely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centres, sadomasochism and drugs. - New York Times Tired collection of S&M stories-hardly a slap, much less a tickle, in the bunch.Elliott (Happy Baby, 2004, etc.) explains in his introduction that enough of these pieces contain autobiographical components to make the whole collection serve as a memoir. If that's true, too bad for him, not because he's had such a hard time finding the right partner to dominate him in a consensual S&M relationship, but because his relationships are so mind-numbingly dull. The introduction contains stock perorations about the importance of sexual freedom in our buttoned-up culture and the benefits of openness about sex in general. That's all fine, of course, except that story by story, the hint that dangerous truths are about to be revealed in the service of such freedom leads to nothing. The 11 roughly chronological stories share the same narrator, who moves from the drug scene in Chicago to the bondage scene in San Francisco, driven by desires he does not fully understand, but which nonetheless seem to guide his every waking moment. He doesn't find it at all difficult to meet women willing to dominate him, but most of the stories are about how such relationships fail to nourish him either emotionally or spiritually. He either gets what he wants from partners he doesn't really like, or he doesn't know how to get what he wants because he doesn't know the rules of such sex play. Eventually, he learns those rules, and finds Eden, with whom he has a nice, normal relationship that incorporates plenty of the domination he enjoys. The narrator has a knack for descriptions of sex that walk a fine line between the clinical and the sensational, but for all that, he tends to fall back on unsatisfying and cliched pop-psych analyses of why he likes to be dominated. His emotional fulfillment turns out to be rather too sweet a dish to end the collection.The narrator's callowness undercuts the sophistication of his topic. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationStephen Elliott is the author of five books, including Happy Baby and A Life Without Consequences. He lives in San Francisco. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |