Three of the Best

I’m thrilled to reveal that a story of mine, On My Knees in Barcelona, has been selected for inclusion not only in Violet Blue’s Best Women’s Erotica 2010 but also in Violet’s Best of Best Women’s Erotica, an anthology spanning the last 5+ years of the series. Wow, me! I’ve never subbed anything to Violet before (and I think she’s awesome) so I’m bowled over by the double hit. BWE 2010 is released in December this year and Best of Best will be out in Spring 2010. Violet says of this year’s anthology:

Best Women’s Erotica 2010 is going to be fucking tight and hot and will get under your skin in the best ways; it’s a collection of the most unexpected literary erotica I’ve ever seen.

I can’t wait! So far, I know Rachel Kramer Bussel is in BWE 2010 but I’m not sure who else is in either of the volumes. I’d love to find out.

In more Best news, my story Such a Special Couple, first published in Alison Tyler’s J is for Jealousy, has been chosen by Maxim Jakubowski for his annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, out early 2010. As ever, Mammoth offers a stellar line-up (and probably a rotten cover) with stories from Jeremy Edwards, EllaRegina, Shanna Germain, Donna George Storey, Craig Sorensen and I’m not sure who else because I just copied all those names from Jeremy’s blog!

Anyway, my big disappointment in all of this is the cover for BWE 2010. I pretty much expected to see an image of an eroticised woman but, because I live with this crazy thing called hope, a tiny fragment of me was thinking, Well, maybe it’ll be different this year; maybe Cleis, a supposedly progressive, liberal, feminist press, will make a move to be less sexist; maybe they’ll make a gesture by using an image including, say, a guy’s hand. After all, the call for subs asked for ‘primarily heterosexual’ fiction. But nope, Cleis just reached into their Arse Files and stuck a woman’s butt on the front. With covers like that, small wonder last year’s BWE volume is riding high in Amazon’s lesbian erotica and fiction charts. Anyway, in the interests of gender equality, I’m reaching into my own Arse Files to repost one of my favourite sexy-man-with-bare-butt images.

Ah, I do love that pic.