[close] Erotica takes another sauntering, spike-heeled step toward the literary mainstream with this anthology of stories by some of the best-known sex writers in America, each paired with a memoir or personal commentary on the work. The editor's introduction can be skipped, but the rest of the book should intrigue devotees of this developing genre, especially those who wonder about the relationship between writers' sex lives or desires and the stories they write. In "Porno, Ergo Sum," for example, Jack Fritscher confesses that he breathes in experience and exhales fiction. In "Screaming Underwater," Lucy Taylor describes her attempt to merge the erotic and the spiritual. And Carol Queen, in an introduction to pages from The Leather Daddy and the Femme, provides perhaps the most articulate--and politically explicit--piece of writing in the book, a defense of her reputation as "Rebecca of Sunnyf**k Farm." Cecilia Tan may say it best, however, in the memoir that accompanies her early story, "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords": "Writing is identity and loss of identity at the same time." You may learn something here about the personalities of the writers included, but there is really no explaining the ways that fiction moves us, or the reasons writers write. --Regina Marler [close]