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Three the Hard Way: Erotic Novellas
Susie Bright Three the Hard Way
Erotic Novellas by William Harrison, Greg Boyd, and Tsaurah Litzky
Pull down the shades and settle in for pleasure with this trio of erotic novellas -- handpicked by Susie Bright -- showcasing stories that are hot and masterful.
Susie Bright, hailed by The New York Times as "the avatar of American erotica," is the undisputed grandmaster of the genre. Now she has handpicked three rising stars -- new masters -- whose stories will delight, arouse, and captivate you.
Connected by a central theme -- the idea that one sexual moment can change a person forever -- each story is wildly different from anything you have read before.
In "Shadow of a Man," Emmy Award-winning writer William Harrison takes us to South Africa, where a photographer who thinks he's seen -- and done -- it all begins an intense affair with the daughter of a famous general. "The Motion of the Ocean" is Tsaurah Litzky's undaunted story about a woman's coming-of-age from her adolescence in the 1960s to the over-the-top sexuality of the 1990s. Greg Boyd's "The Widow" is about the consequences that transpire when a husband reads an erotic novel that his wife has been writing in secret. In it, she has fantasized the outrageous sexual experiences of a widow.
Sensual, provocative, funny, and profound, Three the Hard Way is a pleasure trove of great finds discovered by America's most trusted name in erotica.
Erotic Novellas by William Harrison, Greg Boyd, and Tsaurah Litzky
Pull down the shades and settle in for pleasure with this trio of erotic novellas -- handpicked by Susie Bright -- showcasing stories that are hot and masterful.
Susie Bright, hailed by The New York Times as "the avatar of American erotica," is the undisputed grandmaster of the genre. Now she has handpicked three rising stars -- new masters -- whose stories will delight, arouse, and captivate you.
Connected by a central theme -- the idea that one sexual moment can change a person forever -- each story is wildly different from anything you have read before.
In "Shadow of a Man," Emmy Award-winning writer William Harrison takes us to South Africa, where a photographer who thinks he's seen -- and done -- it all begins an intense affair with the daughter of a famous general. "The Motion of the Ocean" is Tsaurah Litzky's undaunted story about a woman's coming-of-age from her adolescence in the 1960s to the over-the-top sexuality of the 1990s. Greg Boyd's "The Widow" is about the consequences that transpire when a husband reads an erotic novel that his wife has been writing in secret. In it, she has fantasized the outrageous sexual experiences of a widow.
Sensual, provocative, funny, and profound, Three the Hard Way is a pleasure trove of great finds discovered by America's most trusted name in erotica.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
William Neal Harrison
16 books10 followersWilliam Neal Harrison was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter perhaps best known for writing the short story "Roller Ball Murder" which was made into the movie Rollerball in 1975.
Harrison was the adopted son of Samuel Scott and Mary Harrison and grew up in Dallas, Texas, attending public schools. His mother read widely, kept elaborate scrapbooks featuring both family members and celebrities, and wrote devotional poetry.
Harrison attended Texas Christian University, where he became editor of the campus newspaper, The Skiff, and began to write. He later attended Vanderbilt University where he studied to teach comparative religion at the divinity school, but once again he began to write and made lifelong friends in the Department of English. After a year teaching in North Carolina at Atlantic Christian College, he moved his young family to Iowa where he studied in the creative writing program for ten months. At Iowa he sold his first short story to Esquire and published reviews in The Saturday Review.
In 1964, Harrison moved with his family to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he published his first novels and in 1966 became the founder and co-director of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Arkansas with his colleague James Whitehead. Many American and European writers and poets came as visitors to their program and their students went on to publish hundreds of books of poetry and fiction in major New York and university publishing houses.
Harrison also served on the original board of directors (1970–75) for the Associated Writing Programs during the great growth period of creative writing in American literary education. He was also on the board of advisors for the Natural and Cultural Heritage Commission for the State of Arkansas (1976–81).
Harrison received a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fiction (1974), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Fiction (1977), the Christopher Award for Television (1970) and a Columbia School of Journalism Prize with Esquire Magazine (1971). He has been represented in Who’s Who in America since 1975. His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories (1968), Southern Writing in the Sixties (1967), All Our Secrets Are the Same: New Fiction from Esquire (1977), The Literature of Sport (1980), The Best American Mystery Stories (2006), New Stories from the South (2006), Fifty Years of Descant (2008) and numerous textbooks.
Merlee was Harrison's wife of more than fifty years and his children are Laurie, Sean and Quentin. He lived in Fayetteville until his death, although he traveled widely in Africa, China, the Middle East and Europe. He was a longtime baseball fan and Chicago Cubs supporter. He was an active fly fisherman and played tennis and golf.
His heroes were Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever, but he taught hundreds of fine authors in his classes and offered seminars on James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Federico Fellini and others.
Harrison was the adopted son of Samuel Scott and Mary Harrison and grew up in Dallas, Texas, attending public schools. His mother read widely, kept elaborate scrapbooks featuring both family members and celebrities, and wrote devotional poetry.
Harrison attended Texas Christian University, where he became editor of the campus newspaper, The Skiff, and began to write. He later attended Vanderbilt University where he studied to teach comparative religion at the divinity school, but once again he began to write and made lifelong friends in the Department of English. After a year teaching in North Carolina at Atlantic Christian College, he moved his young family to Iowa where he studied in the creative writing program for ten months. At Iowa he sold his first short story to Esquire and published reviews in The Saturday Review.
In 1964, Harrison moved with his family to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he published his first novels and in 1966 became the founder and co-director of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Arkansas with his colleague James Whitehead. Many American and European writers and poets came as visitors to their program and their students went on to publish hundreds of books of poetry and fiction in major New York and university publishing houses.
Harrison also served on the original board of directors (1970–75) for the Associated Writing Programs during the great growth period of creative writing in American literary education. He was also on the board of advisors for the Natural and Cultural Heritage Commission for the State of Arkansas (1976–81).
Harrison received a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fiction (1974), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Fiction (1977), the Christopher Award for Television (1970) and a Columbia School of Journalism Prize with Esquire Magazine (1971). He has been represented in Who’s Who in America since 1975. His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories (1968), Southern Writing in the Sixties (1967), All Our Secrets Are the Same: New Fiction from Esquire (1977), The Literature of Sport (1980), The Best American Mystery Stories (2006), New Stories from the South (2006), Fifty Years of Descant (2008) and numerous textbooks.
Merlee was Harrison's wife of more than fifty years and his children are Laurie, Sean and Quentin. He lived in Fayetteville until his death, although he traveled widely in Africa, China, the Middle East and Europe. He was a longtime baseball fan and Chicago Cubs supporter. He was an active fly fisherman and played tennis and golf.
His heroes were Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever, but he taught hundreds of fine authors in his classes and offered seminars on James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Federico Fellini and others.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 22, 2012
The novellas in Three the Hard Way were a little hit and mostly miss for me. In all three stories, the writing was excellent -- not what I was necessarily expecting from erotica -- a genre that I have not dabbled in before.
But the narrative of Tsaurah Litzky's The Motion of the Ocean felt completely fragmented. Each chapter could have been about a completely different character, if the names hadn't been the same. It didn't feel like a cohesive story, just a collection of hardly-related short stories all mashed together into an uncomfortable semblance of a novella.
Greg Boyd's The Widow was the gem of the bunch. He superbly melds two stories together: an erotic short story written by Mandy Millhouse--an unassuming but unfulfilled housewife; and the story of Mandy's husband after he discovers the first pages of her story unclaimed on the printer and begins reading along in secret, wondering what it means that the husband in her very autobiographical short story is killed off in the first few pages by an unexpected heart attack. The stories sing in harmony and really give you the unique feeling that you are glimpsing the secret and private lives of others' most intimate thoughts and moments.
William Harrison's A Shadow of a Man had some interesting elements and good characters. But the ending was a big let-down not only to the novella but for the collection.
The taste levels, too, were questionable for me and a slight turn-off to dabbling in this genre again. I'd rather stick to books like Kushiel's Dart, The Valley of Horses, and Outlander, which deliver strong emotion and character sympathy along with a good dose of romance.
But the narrative of Tsaurah Litzky's The Motion of the Ocean felt completely fragmented. Each chapter could have been about a completely different character, if the names hadn't been the same. It didn't feel like a cohesive story, just a collection of hardly-related short stories all mashed together into an uncomfortable semblance of a novella.
Greg Boyd's The Widow was the gem of the bunch. He superbly melds two stories together: an erotic short story written by Mandy Millhouse--an unassuming but unfulfilled housewife; and the story of Mandy's husband after he discovers the first pages of her story unclaimed on the printer and begins reading along in secret, wondering what it means that the husband in her very autobiographical short story is killed off in the first few pages by an unexpected heart attack. The stories sing in harmony and really give you the unique feeling that you are glimpsing the secret and private lives of others' most intimate thoughts and moments.
William Harrison's A Shadow of a Man had some interesting elements and good characters. But the ending was a big let-down not only to the novella but for the collection.
The taste levels, too, were questionable for me and a slight turn-off to dabbling in this genre again. I'd rather stick to books like Kushiel's Dart, The Valley of Horses, and Outlander, which deliver strong emotion and character sympathy along with a good dose of romance.
Displaying 1 of 1 review