Sometimes surprising, always stimulating -- this book offers a snapshot of America’s complex sexual practices and mores as seen through Cleis’s unique lens. It is the best nonfiction sex journalism of the year in one unforgettable book. In a single generation, Cleis Press has fundamentally changed the way people talk -- and what they read -- about sex and gender. Founded by Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste in 1980, the press’s mission is to explore and celebrate sex in all its forms, with a decided tilt toward the queer and the subversive. For the first time, Cleis’s founders bring their own sex-positive sensibilities to bear on one of their most popular series. In Best Sex Writing 2006, they’ve collected the year’s most challenging and provocative nonfiction articles on this endlessly evocative subject. The essays here comprise a detailed, direct survey of the contemporary American sexual landscape, a landscape Newman and Delacoste helped shape with such ground-breaking books as Sex Work and The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex. Major commentators both in and out of Cleis’s stable of writers examine the many roles sex plays in our lives in these literate and lively essays.

Best Sex Writing 2012 answers the hottest questions of the year - and raises many more - as it probes the inner lives of those on the front lines - whether political, personal or cultural.Top-notch writing and fascinating topics. Featuring a foreword by leading sexpert Susie Bright and edited by media mavin, sex blogger and seasoned author and editor of erotica Rachel Kramer Bussel.

Being a sex worker isn’t something to write home about for most women (and men) in the $12 billion-a-year sex industry. Prostitutes, strippers, and adult film stars put themselves, and what they do for a living, out on the street, stage, and TV screen every day, but they often keep their working lives hidden from friends, family, and other employers. They do this because sex work is widely considered illegal, unhealthy, and immoral. Edited by Annie Oakley, Working Sex, New Voices from a Changing Industry features stories and contributions from sex workers—strippers, prostitutes, domes, film stars, phone sex operators, and internet models—who are speaking out. This provocative anthology showcases voices from a vibrant community intent on unmasking the jobs they do with dignity and pride. Contributors tackling issues of class, gender, race, labor, and sexuality with blazing insight and critical observations include Michelle Tea, Stephen Elliot, Nomy Lamm, Ana Voog, Vaginal Davis, and Mirha-Soleil Ross.

Erotic romance reigns supreme as a big category of women's fictions; a billion-dollar business serviced by a new breed of uninhibited writer. This book is the necessary how-to for first-timers and a terrific guide for seasoned professionals as well, who are putting their racy (and lucrative) fantasies to paper. Now, for the first time, a veteran erotic romance author shows exactly what to do and how. The first book to guide writers to succeed in this mutli-million dollar genre. Explores how to set up a plot and write good, steamy sex scenes. From a best-selling experienced author. Includes resource section for research tools and further reading. Interviews with top editors in the field. Foreword by Kate Duffy, editorial director at Kensington Publishing and founding editor of the genre.

The writing in this book is so bad, it deserves its own taxonomy of suckitude. Gillian Flynn, Mary Roach, Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, Chuck Palahniuk, Amy Tan, A.J. Jacobs, Daniel Clowes, Jeff Greenwald, Po Bronson…the list goes on. They all sucked once, and they all have the guts to share some of their crappiest early work in Drivel: an uplifting bit of voyeurism, based on the sold-out “Regreturature” stage shows in San Francisco, and brought to you by Litquake and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Within these pages you’ll find abstruse and esoteric poetry (bad); incoherent and illogical short stories (worse); bumfuzzling proto-journalism (shameful); and pretentious, overwrought journal entries (we’ll not speak of this again). Thanks to these courageous but foolhardy writers, the world now knows the real meaning of a work-in-progress.

In the spring of 2007, a brilliant computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence. The case takes a twist when Nina's former lover, and Hans's former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of.At the time of Sturgeon's confession, Stephen Elliot is paralyzed by writer's block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over the state of his romantic life. But he is fascinated by Sturgeon, whose path he has often crossed in San Francisco's underground S&M scene. What kind of person, he wonders, confesses to a murder he likely did not commit? One answer is, perhaps, a man like Elliott's own father.So begins a riveting journey through a neon landscape of false confessions, self-medication, and torturous sex. Set against the backdrop of a nation at war, in the declining years of the Silicon Valley tech boom and the dawn of Paris Hilton's celebrity, The Adderall Diaries is at once a gripping account of a murder trial and a scorching investigation of the self. Tough, tender, and unflinchingly honest, it is the breakout book by one of the most daring writers of his generation.

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when things start to get crazy. At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away.