“Sian Hughes’ delightful imagination and technical talent makes each story a unique treat.” – Boyd Clack – Creator of High Hopes and Satellite City A teenager performs stripteases in her bedroom window as funeral processions pass by. A grieving mother reunites with her miscarried foetus. A widow takes on the sinister, rapacious treehouse in next door’s garden. Combining pitch-perfect, darkly comic observations with tender touches of humanity, Pain Sluts chronicles the flaws, frailties, and enduring spirit of an eclectic cast of curious characters as they navigate threats to their identity and humanity. A brave and bold literary debut bursting with calamity and compassion, Pain Sluts is an astonishing collection of stories which lays bare our beauty and bizarreness. Laden with love, loss and longing, this book illuminates Sian’s extraordinary ability to create believable characters that brave our brittle world, often in outlandish or unusual ways. Sharp and tender, true and wise, these stories announce the arrival of a uniquely talented new voice in British fiction. “Sian Hughes writes her characters with love and warmth, dissecting their complex inner lives with beautiful and profound prose. The stories are raw, honest, sometimes disturbing, capturing the enormity of tiny moments and the extraordinariness of ordinary people. Written with a dark humour and an exquisite attention to detail, the stories linger, unfolding in the mind, long after the book has been closed. Hughes is clearly a writer to watch.” – Catrin Kean – Author of Salt Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2021 “Sian Hughes is an immaculate stylist, and Pain Sluts is one exquisite and harrowing revelation after another. In this magnificent collection, Hughes claims a darkly radiant fictional territory that is all her own.” – Anthony Trevelyan – Author of The Weightless World Longlisted for the 2016 Desmond Elliott Prize “In this wonderfully visceral collection, with its echoes of AM Homes and the early transgressive short stories of Ian McEwan, Sian Hughes has fashioned her own brand of distinctly South Walian Gothic, full of bodies and their bloody mysteries, people and their hidden perverse selves.” – John Williams – Author of The Cardiff Trilogy “Haunting and hilarious, tender and tumultuous. A bold and original collection that depicts life for women in contemporary south Wales in all its mundanity and quirkiness. Thrills from beginning to end.” – Rachel Trezise – Author of Fresh Apples and Easy Meat Winner of the inaugural 2006 Dylan Thomas Prize “Sian Hughes shares Thomas Morris’ skill of evoking the everyday, the ordinary, and the potentially banal in warm, three-dimensional technicolour. Her characters stand up, speak, and walk off the page to inhabit your mind. The stories in Pain Sluts are not easily forgotten.” – Sonia Hope – Jerwood/Arvon Mentee and Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize Finalist Sian Hughes is a freelance copywriter, screenwriter, and author whose short stories have been published online and in print and adapted for film and TV, appearing on HTV, BBC Wales, and S4C. An adaptation of her short story ‘Consumed’, starring ‘The Descent’s’ Shauna Macdonald, was premiered in 2021 at the Glasgow Short Film Festival. Having recently completed an MA in Creative Writing, for which she gained a Distinction, Sian also works as a creative practitioner for the Arts Council of Wales. Sian lives in Cardiff with her husband, three children, and a menagerie of wayward animals. sianhughes.me.co.uk @flossingthecat

I guess this is a good place to end this book as once again; you are caught up with the most unusual life that Cally and I share with our unusual family. However, once again my life with Cally never seems to be dull anymore. In fact, my life with Cally has never been dull; it is just more exciting since we got married almost a year ago. Milly has been progressing very well as her sissy maid self under the direction of Miss T. As well; Molly seems to accept and even enjoy milly better now. Sabrina certainly enjoys sissy maid milly as she gets three days off each week now that she has milly to fill in for her. Sir certainly has brought a lot of excitement to the house and that excitement seems to still be growing as he seeks to dominate everyone in the house and not just us maids and Ally and Toni. Sir getting arrested certainly presents me with a big challenge as although I do not believe that he has actually committed a crime; I do believe that innocent people go to prison because people on juries do not believe that they should live their lives in any way unlike the way society demands of them. In other words, if they do not like what Sir did and the District Attorney says it was wrong, they just agree and give it no more thought. I disobeyed a direct order from Cally for the very first time. Cally let me know that that was unacceptable in a very painful and very humiliating way. I don’t think I will make that mistake again, at least I hope not. Cally and I went to the most unusual place in South America in cooperation with Lloyds of London, the FBI, and Interpol; in an effort to find out why men were disappearing from FemDom Nation; a community of Dominate women and male submissives. FemDom Nation is sort of like a hotel for vacationing Dominate women and Submissive males. People from all over the world come there to enjoy their life style for a few days to a few weeks. Submissive men can go their alone or with a dominate female. Dominate women are welcome with or without a submissive male. It was really a neat place and Cally and I had a very nice time. However our time was cut short as a result of Sir getting arrested, so we came home early and without meeting our objective in order to help out Sir and Ally. Cally and I need to go back again to complete our mission, but Cally decided to wait until after Thanksgiving.

Honestly, I'm ready to take a step back from the Subs Club. Making the kink world a safer place for subs is the sort of bandwagon I'd have boarded as an idealist in my early twenties, but now I'm a pragmatist in my late twenties. I prefer to focus on adopting and raising a child. But unexpected factors inevitably derail my plans. Like Drix Seger-attractive and the first genuine sadist I've encountered. If I were not in the process of renouncing my masochistic ways and becoming the normal, responsible potential father the adoption agency wants to see, Drix and I might do well together. But he has a foolish name and belongs to a cult of vampyres, and I am quitting kink. So why does Drix's infatuation with blood and biting make me so hot I can't think straight? And why, when he looks at me, does he seem to see something beyond a basket case with a stick up my ass? Can I start a new phase in my life without leaving part of myself behind? Please send help. -Miles

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A thrilling portrait of political terror and the violent pleasures found in warehouses, bathrooms, and dungeons across New York City, X is a novel that delves into the psyches of characters on the margins The world is ending, and down-and-out sadist Lee spends their days working for a big corporation and their nights wandering the streets of Brooklyn listening to true crime podcasts. But everything changes when Lee is dragged to a warehouse party by their best friend, where they find themself in the clutches of the seductive and bloodthirsty X. When Lee seeks her out again, she’s nowhere to be found. Amid the steady constriction of civil rights and the purging of migrants and refugees, the U.S. government has recently begun encouraging the semi-voluntary “exporting” of undesirable citizens—the radicalized, the dissident, and the ungovernable. Word has it that X may be among those leaving. If Lee doesn’t track her down soon, she may be gone forever.

An introduction into the Master/slave relationship. This book removes all the mystery behind this alternative lifestyle. Dennis Najee spells out The Submission Process in step-by-step detail. This book will help any newcomer avoid the pitfalls that so many make. The Internet is full of people pretending to be real. This book helps to arm you with the knowledge of how to spot a fake instantly. Many have reported that they were better able to protect themselves because of the information contained herein.

Her naiveté and his intensity fuse into a time bomb of sex and secrets. Can a young feminist and a Dominant with secrets make it work? “The first year is the most traumatic.” Leda's medical school advisor's words seemed like the words of a retiring blowhard, until she met Xander. What starts as a tutorial in anatomy quickly evolves into Xander's desire to possess Leda. While she is drawn to him, wants to give in and experience sharp passion unlike any she has ever known, she has reservations. Can a feminist, a modern independent woman truly be a sexual submissive? Why is he holding back? What is the dark past that Xander is hiding from her? And ultimately, can she trust him—with her body and her heart? Xander wasn't looking for a submissive, but his attraction to Leda is undeniable. He tries to follow caution, but ultimately he has to take her, subdue her, at her insistence. The more he opens himself up to her, though, the more his past comes back to haunt him, with nearly catastrophic events when his former lover shows up at their door on New Year's Eve. How can he keep and protect Leda from all the risks of his kink, when he knows he is the biggest threat to her wellbeing?

Representations and coverage of S&M have become quite common nowadays, whether we see them in the fashion industry, commercials, the news, on television, film, the internet, and so on. But in the population at large and in the academic community, too, it is still persistently stigmatized. This marginalization, along with its ambivalently persecuted status, is a result, significantly, of a nineteenth century legacy. This legacy begins with Kraftt-Ebing’s designation of sadomasochism, along with gay and lesbian desire, as a perversion, and continues in the popular and expert (mis)understandings which prevail. More generally, most people today will recognize that all human relations are power relations. Yet most people will also deny this and mask these power relations by invoking all sorts of things, like romantic love, sentimental attachment, companionate marriage, friendship, peace, non-violence, harmony, and the list goes on, ad nauseam. Not that these do not exist in a sadomasochistic relation, but sadomasochists are unflinching in their recognition that all of these are also permeated by power relations. It is not only impossible to purge these relations of power but for sadomasochists it is also undesirable to do so. It is not only more honest to acknowledge the power that saturates these relations but also more instructive in the sense that S&M provides a context in which one learns to exercise power and to submit to it in a responsible way. Even in scholarly critical and theoretical discussions of S&M, the prevailing opinion is that the power exercised in sadomasochism is not “real.” It is of course not real in the sense that slavery and violence no longer has a legal status. But reality cannot of course be gauged or even approximated by its legal status alone. For most practitioners, it is hard to deny the reality of pain, of humiliation, of degradation, in the moment of its enactment. One can hardly deny the reality of bringing the whip down on someone’s back or of having it sear across one’s buttocks.