Tedious. Almost all of the characters in this anthology are miserable or unlikable, which really only serves to give kink a bad name.

Suffers from the same self-aggrandising introspective misery-porn levels of wank that a lot of ‘erotic literature’ does. But with the added bonus of outright rape scenes (no, not ‘consensual non consent’ or ‘dubious consent’ we’re talking grimdark torture and rape followed by crying and trauma. Happy kink anthology!)

You’ll get more thoughtful kink on AO3 for free. It’s almost like most of the authors took this as a challenge to misrepresent the subject and write a world where most people don’t enjoy kink, or may even be rapists if they do. Wouldn’t recommend this to a single person in the scene. Or anyone else for that matter. ( )

25% in. Somehow there is too much fluff and not enough explicit sec scenes for my taste. ( )

‘’Bristol, Vermont. Summer - the flies biting. Vermont is named for its green mountains, the man tells her. To her, they look like sleeping animals with soft pelts. With the windows of the rental car down, it smells like cows, so they roll them up. The light has a weight to it. She squints against the sun. They have come to the mountains to get away from the city, where life feels unbearable. She has just dyed her hair blonde and it is parched and fine, like straw. Too yellow, also like straw. In the photographs he will develop late, her profile is like a smear of golf on the print, in front of the green mountains, in front of the hazy blue sky. After she dyes it this one time, she won’t do it again. But that is far from now.’’

I would read any collection in which Carmen Maria Machado is a contributor. In this case, the title almost prevented me from reading the anthology. And then I saw Machado’s name and I said to myself ‘’Don’t be such a bore.’’After all, the majority of contemporary Literary Fiction is built on a fascinating foundation of being weird, Avant-guard, provocative, and all-around peculiar. And so, I set off for a rather satisfying journey.

Every single one of these stories depicts sexuality, identity and choices in all their forms and expressions. Every single one of these stories communicates a wonderful sense of setting and most of them are ‘’populated’’ by interesting characters armed with will and purpose and a loud voice that declares ‘’I am here. This is who I am. This is what I want.’’ Now, two or three of the stories were a bit too naive and graphic for my taste but the rest of the collection deserved 4 (and even 5 stars) alone.

Trust by Larissa Pham is a story for summer afternoons. It is all about doubts, trust and just letting yourself go with the flow of your wishes. Canada by Callum Angus is wonderfully poetic and melancholic. Oh, Youth by Brandon Taylor narrates the summer of a hedonistic trio that ‘’didn’t mean any of this to happen.’’ Impact Play by Peter Mountford contains a goth woman that is in the business of selling gravestones, enough said. Reach by Roxane Gay is full of despair, possessiveness and obsession to the point of madness. Scissors by Kim Fu is seductive and suffocating and unforgettable. The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror by Carmen Maria Machado is the very reason why you should rush and read this collection, a story of exploitation, ambition and blind trust set in pre-war Paris. Phenomenal? Yes, it is. Retouch/Switch by Cara Hoffman, a story full of regret and unconditional love. Emotional Technologies by Chris Kraus, a chronicle of Art and sexuality in Los Angeles and Poland during the end of the 20th century.

Yes, this is Literary Fiction.

‘’Were we this or were we that? Cruising or sleeping out, safer together. The music loud from the street and the city sprawling white below us. You were the purest form The one I liked best.
Our devotion and our poverty and our whole future clear.
You were the only thing between me and nothing.’’

Many thanks to Simon & Schuster UK and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ ( )

CW: non-con, under-negotiated kink, ignoring a safeword, shame, attempted/near-rape, ignoring SSC/risk-aware kink practices with abandon and ignorance. Probably more? I dunno. It was a lot. Of stories. And kink. Just. Be careful and take care of you while reading this.

*drums fingers* So. In general, I am not the biggest fan of short stories. They just tend not to be my bag. I've also been reading, very deliberately, about human sexuality, including kink, in both fiction and nonfiction, in both traditionally published and nontraditionally published forms, for my entire adult life. So I'd say I both was and was not the audience for this anthology of short stories all having something to do with kink. Do with that information what you will when I say that I really, really didn't care for it.

A handful of the stories here, while I might not have loved them, I thought were doing something really interesting and were successful as examples of the form. (I'll list at the end of my review which ones those were.) And I think the whole anthology suffered from the framing it was given, from being packaged in this book with this black cover with the forbidding red "Kink" as a title and from coming under a two-page introduction from the editors that makes claims of providing something needed and new in this collection ("a book like this hasn't been published in a long time") but fails to make any real argument as to why we do or to prove that we don't already have it. The introduction ignores (or worse (?), is unaware of) the vast array of kink writing in fiction that has been happening in fandom spaces, in romance, and, yes, in long-form literary fiction for... well, forever, really. The introduction, which points to the editors' desire to produce "the kind of book that could sit on artists' residencies' library shelves" and wants to push back against a perceived "flattening" and "simplification" of kink in popular culture, including popular books*, reads like the worst kind of elitist nonsense. There is so much good writing out there already about this subject. Is there room for more? Of course! Is there room for an anthology of literary short stories on this subject? Of course! Is it good to have writing on this subject in all manner of genres, including literary fiction? Of course! But this suggestion that this anthology has finally given us something that was just tragically missing before, that it has rolled in and filled some kind hole that desperately needed filling, seriously chapped my ass. (Heh.) So. Are there some stories in here that I might have been happier about if I had come across them in a magazine or a collection of an author's work or some other anthology? Yeah, maybe. 'Cause after that intro, I went in mad.

Now, as to the stories themselves. Always, always, in an anthology, some things will float your boat while others don't. For sure that was the case for me here. But I genuinely didn't *really* like any of them. And some of that is the literary-short-story-ness of them. No judgement. (Okay, mild judgement. But only mild!). This genre (it *is* a genre, with conventions and expectations and weaknesses, just like any other) just isn't the genre that really rolls down my socks. But on the whole, there's an awful lot of miscommunication and shame and obfuscation in these stories. And very little of that miscommunication and obfuscation and shame gets resolved or cleared up or transformed into self-acceptance. And, fair? I guess? I mean, it's not romance. No one promised me any happy endings. And it's not terribly fair to judge any one of these stories about miscommunication or obfuscation or shame just because it happens to be in company with fifteen others also about those things. But I was kind of chanting to myself by the end: "please, please, *please* don't let this be the first (or floggers and crosses, please not the last) thing someone first trying to figure out their kinky tendencies reads." Because I really feel that the chances of coming away from reading this anthology with negative feelings and associations about kink is really high. One might argue (even *I* might argue), that it is neither the job nor the responsibility of a short story anthology to be a steward of its readers in that way. But the introduction seems to argue that it is? Or at least that it wants to give readers an image of kink that is broad and more positive and more nuanced than the popular perception. And I'm just not sure it succeeds.

Have I just made an argument that this anthology's biggest flaw is a shitty introduction? Maybe. If you love literary short stories, you will almost certainly enjoy Kink more than I did. And if you've never read fiction about kink, I encourage you to start elsewhere.

*This is where I point out that romance, as a genre, is the most popular of all popular books, right? This is where I point out that romance consistently makes up just shy of half of all popular paperbacks sold yearly? And over a third of *all* popular fiction?

The Stories in Kink I Would Recommend

"The Cure," Melissa Febos
"Oh, Youth," Brandon Taylor
"The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror," Carmen Maria Machado
"The Voyeurs," Zeyn Joukhadar ( )

a soaring, bold, and varied exploration of desire and intimacy and our relationships with each other and ourselves. highly recommend even (or maybe especially) if you don't think kink is your 'thing'