sex

We're not saying sex is something to be ashamed of, and far be it from us to declare any activity between consenting adults to be unnatural. It's just that some types of sex are weird and even terrifying to us.

But, if you're going to do something that would make a dominatrix flinch, you might as well do it right. Thus we offer these sex guides that you'll either find helpful or nightmarish.

Not many literary readings are restricted to an over-18 audience. Fewer still take place under circus tents. Yet nothing could be more appropriate for the scandalous German best-seller “Wetlands,” by a television personality and author, Charlotte Roche.

Of course it’s the ‘role of women’ issue that’s got ’em buzzing and buying—over 680,000 copies since February. Yep.

After covering corpses in Stiff and ghosts in Spook, Mary Roach tackled a new (for her) subject in Bonk, sex. In this video from Slate Magazine, Mary Roach discusses the book, including how she and her husband were the first people to be filmed in 4D ultrasound while having sex. Seems up til now, no one knew exactly where the parts inside interacted. Ultrasound pic included.

A recent post by Nancy Kress concerning the mature themes of current young adult science fiction struck a chord with my own observations over the last few years. Namely, that the fiction being marketed to today's young adults deals with adult themes more than the young adult fiction from yesteryear. SFSignal asks a bunch of people in SF/F the question.

Author Robert Olen Butler is about to publish a book of short stories imagining the sexual encounters of famous couples. He claims that the book is “not really about the fitting together of the bodies” but is “a rendering of the inner consciences of these people.” I dunno…Santa and a female elf? Says more about the author’s inner conscience if you ask me.

Certainly a unique subject for an encyclopedia, but academically useful, I presume. “The thematic subjects have been intelligently chosen. They include articles on syphilis as a literary muse, the rhetoric of seduction, confession and guilt, fairy tales, science fiction, slash fiction, grisettes, somatopia and furniture.

According to author Lucia Perillo, anyway. So here’s a book about nothing but. Do Me is an anthology of sexual tales from Tin House literary magazine. “Adolescent lust. Reckless infidelities. Soulful communions. Vacuous fantasies. Off-the-beaten-path eroticism. You name it, you’ll find just about every form of sexual encounter between the pages of this collection.”

Two great authors, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both writing at the same time, both from New England, Melville has to beg for readers and Hawthorne is doing good. What was the deciding factor. The sex. Herman Melville is almost antiseptic whereas Hawthorne today could have written for True Confessions. Want a best seller, sell sex.

Violet Blue offers her list of the best sex books of 2007--from the New Erotic Photography to the Internet Escort's Handbook to the Best Lesbian Bondage Erotica. She also plugs the nine (nine!) books she published in 2007.

SocioScifi, and rational for myths that create the mischievous canvas of historical nonsense: creating passage in a way that linear print can't do as easily without sequencial art. I want to lead you on a scavenger hunt through forms of time, stitches of space, and your own reality; to collect a conclusion out of altering endings, and reincarnated/reborn beginnings.