Publication Date: May 5, 2008
Format: Paperback
US $14.95
CAN $16.00
UK £8.99
ISBN: 9780786720804
ISBN-10: 0786720808
Published by Running Press
These 21 stories by erotica pioneer Cecilia Tan show the breadth of what's possible in the human erotic imagination. Ranging from the mildly titillating to the transformative, the stories travel from familiar bedrooms to faraway planets and magical realms. From a lonely woman who finds her perfect lover lurking in a bookstore, to a college student who discovers her own hidden magic, from the erotic awakening of a goddess, to the sexual adventures of goth girls with attitude, the stories mix the sexual and sensual with intriguing plots and settings. The follow-up to the groundbreaking collection Black Feathers (HarperCollins, 1998), White Flames celebrates sexuality through both body and mind, with stories that are not shy of carnal subjects and which highlight their importance to the characters in question. These are the pinnacle of twenty-first century women-positive, sex-positive literature. Modern gothic, seductively surreal, startlingly different, these stories are reprinted from a wide range of sources (including Best Women's Erotica, On Our Backs, Hot & Bothered, and many others) and also includes several never-before-published tales.
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"Cantabrigian scribe Cecilia Tan [is] one of the nation's best-known enchantresses of the erotic fiction genre."--The Boston Phoenix
"Tan can write erotica and combine it with... almost anything and make it completely alluring, arresting, and entirely believable."--True Review
"Inventive and playful, Tan exhibits great imagination."--Penthouse.com
"[Her] best work fuses [fiction] with sexual practices beyond the norm. Amy Tan it ain't." --Harper's Bazaar Singapore
"Tan's marvelous descriptive abilities ... reach out of the page to the reader with a tremendous urgency. There's something for everyone here." -- Paramour Magazine
"Tan herself is writing about many other things when she writes explicitly about sex: the influence or people's placement in social class and gender, race, and power groups in influencing sexual attraction, sexual practice, and sexuality." --New York Review of Science Fiction
II. Modern Love: The vagaries and complications of desire in millennial America
The Hard Sell (from Fatbrain.com)
Thought So (from Best Women's Erotica 2003, Cleis Press)
Baseball Fever (from Starf*cker, Alyson Publications)
III. Mythic: Fairy tales and legends make echoes in the archetypes of my eroticism
The Little Mermaid (from Aqua Erotica, Crown)
Rite of Spring (from Wet: More Aqua Erotica, Crown)
Bodies of Water (from Hot Women's Erotica, Avalon Publications)
Dragon's Daughter & Hall of Mirrors (from To Be Continued, Firebrand Books)
The Lady In Black (not yet published)
Storm Rider (from The Wildest Ones, Alyson Publications)
Sleeping Beauty (not yet published)
IV. Disconnect: The most intriguing place can be the gap between two people, the negative space created that makes us think something is there, but no matter how well sex seems to connect us, people remain separate
Just Tell Me The Rules (from Aqua Erotica 2, Melcher Media)
Halloween (from Slave, Venus Books/Ballantine Books)
Balancing Act (from Blithe House Quarterly, Winter 2000 issue)
A Tale of the Marketplace (from The Academy, Mystic Rose Books)
V. Queer As Folk: Because even if I'm not, my characters can be Kinsey sixes
Drumbeat (from On Our Backs magazine, also Uniform Sex, Alyson Publications)
Lip Service (from Best S/M Erotica, Black Books)
VI. Technophile: What's not sexy about robots and space ships?
Gyndroid (not yet published)
Now (from Viscera, Venus or Vixen Press)
The Spark (from Periphery, Lethe Press)
Excerpted from the Introduction:
"Such a fraught word: 'fantasy.' It seems to carry two distinct connotations. When someone 'fantasizes' it's assumed we are talking about sexual fantasies. But 'fantasy' in the bookstore is the shelf where the elves and wizards sit, as well as the science fiction, robots, and spaceships. The stories I write seem to inhabit the space where fantasy meets reality. Sometimes that means the erotic fantasy that would never 'really' happen. Other times that means a story that uncovers the magical world that intersects the 'real world,' or a glimpse into the future. But when I tend to do that, eroticism tends to leak through. If I had to make a stab at a lit-crit explanation, I'd say my subconscious thinks the 'normal' state of sexual repression in real life needs cracking open, and sometimes the cracks come in the erotic lives of the characters, sometimes in the 'reality' they inhabit, and sometimes both."