Title: Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women Author: Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel Publisher: Seal Press Publish Date: 2008 Pages: 394 Genres:: Fiction, Compilation Reviewer: J. Arathoon

Rating:

Rachel Kramer Bussel knows how to put together a good collection of stories. From start to finish, Dirty Girls is an enjoyable romp through the minds and fantasies of a variety of skillful writers.

As the title suggests, most of these stories have an edge to them. As Kramer Bussel says in the intro, “The women writing her don’t apologize for being dirty. They know who and what they want, and they go after the objects of their affection in all kinds of different ways.” This doesn’t mean that the women in these stories are all dominant—on the contrary, there’s a nice mix of power levels—but the stories often contain elements of throwing caution to the winds, of living life on the high wire in the name of sexual satisfaction.

In “Live Tonight,” for example, the main character finds someone who is as erotically charged by live music as she is, and she and this new kindred spirit take advantage of this immediately on the dance floor. Or there’s “Icy Hot,” where a woman makes the best of a sweltering New York day by going home with the guy who takes the last bag of ice at the corner market. Or there’s the bibliophile who finds a like-minded couple in a book store in “Shocking Exposé! Secrets Revealed!” and joins them for a burlesque peep show where “the women from the pulp covers seemed to have come to life.”

But summarizing the plots doesn’t really do the collection justice, because the thing that ties these stories together aside from their brazenness is the simple fact that they are all beautifully written. A few stories don’t sparkle as brightly as the rest—“The Mile High Club,” for example, the story of an in-flight tryst, has somewhat flat characters and an insistence on using the term “milking” with regard to breast and genital manipulation that comes across as a little infantile and strange.

But the standard is very high throughout, with many stories that work both as art and as erotica. The very first story in the collection, for example, “Fucking Around,” personifies the cities into human lovers; the main character leaves New York and works her way through Boston, DC, and so forth, until eventually returning to her first love, falling back into the familiar routine with joy but also saying, “I can’t tell if New York likes to hurt me or if she just doesn’t care about me at all.” The descriptions of the cities as people works so well, capturing not only the essence of each place but also familiar types of men—a double satire of both the America and the dating scene.

In short, the stories are hot, the stories are well told, and the stories have meat on their bones that will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book.