Publishers Weekly
10/26/2020
Greenwell and Kwon deliver on their promise to “take kink seriously” in this enticing, wide-ranging collection that plumbs the depths of desire and control. Several passages capture the delicate nature of dominant/submissive relationships—“I think you have the capacity to hurt me the way I need you to,” says a submissive woman after a marriage proposal in Roxane Gay’s “Reach”; “Dee needed to be in control to give up control,” reflects the narrator of Kim Fu’s “Scissors”—and the euphoria that can come from punishment, as in Greenwell’s “Gospodar,” in which a dominant “master” humiliates the gay male narrator by undermining his masculinity. The strongest entries tend to be the naughtiest. Among them, Alexander Chee’s “Best Friendster Date Ever” captures the “rich shame and defiant pleasure” of a kinky sexual encounter; Kwon’s “Safeword” follows how a married couple rejuvenate their sex life by visiting a dungeon; and Peter Mountford’s “Impact Play” finds a fetish-loving couple attending a Kinkfest before a family visit. But Brandon Taylor’s understated “Oh, Youth,” about an aging, rich married couple and the young man they hire to live with them for the summer, is perhaps the most transgressive. This visionary anthology successfully explores the range of sexual potency in the characters’ power plays. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Praise for KINK: STORIES edited by R.O. KWON & GARTH GREENWELL
"This provocative collection will leave you tied to your chair...[A] groundbreaking collection of short stories that explore desire, love, BDSM, and consent...Co-edited by acclaimed novelists R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, Kink...features stories by Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Carmen Maria Machado, and others—that explore desire, love, BDSM, and consent. The book seeks not only to lay bare non-normative physical intimacy, but to change the cultural conversations surrounding it. Yes, there are ropes and riding crops, but the beauty lies in capturing the emotionality as well as the eroticism."—O MAGAZINE
"...Dive into this collection of short stories written by several renowned fiction authors. Set in places like therapists’ offices, private estates, and a sex theater in early 20th century Paris, the stories explore various points across the sexual spectrum from love and desire to BDSM."—COSMOPOLITAN
"Arresting—the characters precise, the language invitingly lush...For all its raunch, the book is very much a study of trust...As the reader’s mind tracks back and forth between bodies and definitions, she begins to see those definitions’ flimsiness, and to wonder about the unexpressed depths that live in each of us."—THE NEW YORKER
"In the introduction to their new collection, editors R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell declare that they want to take kink seriously. The fifteen stories that populate their anthology of literary short fiction certainly do that, investigating the intersection of love, desire and control in pieces that transport readers to therapists’ offices, dungeons and a sex theater in 20th-century Paris. These narratives seek to analyze how gender and politics inform pleasure and power, and are written by the very best of the genre—including Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay and Carmen Maria Machado."—TIME
"There’s delight in Kink’s sensory abundance...Each [story] is a portrait of the way sex can turn slippages and differentials in human society—between people trying to understand one another through language, between the strata of power hierarchies, between differing gender expressions—into a phenomenon only fiction can really get at. Kwon and Greenwell’s Kink is...an invitation to enjoy the sheer inexplicable fact that the body speaks a language we can’t understand."—THE NEW REPUBLIC
"Provocative, poignant, and sublimely written."—TOWN & COUNTRY
"...These stories are in the hands of a master. Covering the wide spectrum of kink, they are filthy and lovely. When I think about the greatest queer writers of our time, names like Alexander Chee, Melissa Febos, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, and Brandon Taylor immediately come to mind — all of which are featured in this new anthology by R.O. Kwon (The Incendiaries) and Garth Greenwell (What Belongs to You, Cleanness)."—THE ADVOCATE
"Fifteen tantalizing stories of pleasure, pain, and power...The characters in these stories illuminate the ways gender, politics, and cultural norms inform power dynamics—inside and outside the bedroom. The collection’s strength lies not just in the diversity of the writers, but also in the experiences they’re exploring. Kink, desire, and sexuality all exist on a spectrum, and so do these stories...Thrilling, provocative, and unapologetically kinky."—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Greenwell and Kwon deliver on their promise to 'take kink seriously' in this enticing, wide-ranging collection that plumbs the depths of desire and control...This visionary anthology successfully explores the range of sexual potency in the characters’ power plays.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"...[S]tories about love and lust from a powerhouse lineup...Edited by two writers whose work takes sex seriously, Kink makes a case for sex’s place in literary fiction."—LITHUB
"Intimate and wide ranging in every sense, the script-flipping, heart-skipping stories gathered here speak to and across one another, conveying truths of desire, experience, and selfhood as only literature can."—BOOKLIST
“Bless Kink for opening up the spaces between all binaries, for daring to hold open desire between bodies on the brink of ecstasy. Between pleasure and pain, between hunger and thirst, between power and surrender, these stories will remind you how desire let loose can write us back to life. A pure erotic fury. An unapologetic delight brought to the cusp of trembling."—LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, bestselling author of Verge and The Book of Joan
“The stories in this book are a chorus of kink, singing different songs of sex and danger and want; they coax us into rooms that were previously closed, and what gorgeous rooms they are.”—ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG, New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias
“Behind all the artifice and pageantry of what we deem as ‘kink,’ there are untold stories, uncharted maps, and hidden worlds of desire, anonymous encounters and solidarities amongst the muted fringes. For those not ‘in the life,’ this collection could read like a journal of degeneracy; for those who are more familiar, it could read like romance. Ultimately, though, in its wide-ranging splendor and sexiness, Kink proves that our desires, no matter how dark they are deemed, are always worthy of being named.”—BRONTEZ PURNELL, author of 100 Boyfriends
Library Journal
09/01/2020
From Chen, a Wall Street Journal correspondent formerly based in Beijing, Land of Big Numbers depicts the Chinese both in and out of China, longing for broader horizons in stories sometimes touched by the surreal. In Kink, John Leonard/Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Kwon (The Incendiaries) and British Book Award-winning Greenwell (What Belongs to You) collate stories of outré sex by authors like Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, and Carmen Maria Machado (50,000-copy first printing). Already a multiaward winner, Moniz debuts with Milk Blood Heat, which examines race, womanhood, human connection, and our inherent darkness in stories that have Florida settings. The protean, mega-award-winning Oates limns characters boldly considering how their lives might have turned out differently in The (Other) You. In Prayer for the Living, Nigerian-born, British-based Booker Prize winner Okri ranges worldwide in stories that test the boundaries of reality.
Kirkus Reviews
2020-11-18
Fifteen tantalizing stories of pleasure, pain, and power.
Bondage. Voyeurism. Dominant-submissive relationships. Public displays. All of these kinks and more are explored in the sexy, star-studded fiction anthology edited by Kwon and Greenwell. In the introduction to their probing collection, the editors write: “By taking kink seriously, these stories recognize how the questions raised in intimate, kinky encounters...can help us to interrogate and begin to re-script the larger cultural narratives that surround us.” The characters in these stories illuminate the ways gender, politics, and cultural norms inform power dynamics—inside and outside the bedroom. The collection’s strength lies not just in the diversity of the writers, but also in the experiences they’re exploring. Kink, desire, and sexuality all exist on a spectrum, and so do these stories. In Kwon’s “Safeword,” a pain-seeking wife and her reluctant husband visit a dominatrix dungeon in Chelsea. Greenwell’s “Gospodar,” which follows a gay man seeking to be dominated, reveals the tenuous nature of trust—and the potential danger of getting more than you bargained for. A trans couple deals with being watched—in their bedroom and community—in Zeyn Joukhadar’s “The Voyeurs.” In an already strong anthology, standout stories include Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror,” about an orphan who finds a home in a radical theater in early-20th century Paris; Brandon Taylor’s “Oh, Youth,” which is about the relationship between a rich, older White couple and the young Black man they’ve hired to live (and play) with them; and Vanessa Clark’s “Mirror, Mirror,” which is set in a “drag transsexual nightclub” and explores the transformative power in being desired exactly as you are (“Sometimes, their basking in my beauty was enough to thrill us both”). The at-times explicit collection won’t be for everyone, but these candid, slinky stories are sure to find their audience.
Thrilling, provocative, and unapologetically kinky.
