1001 Nights and some other news

Quite a few of you seem to have been clicking on links to 1001 Nights Press from old posts on this blog, and may have come up with 404 errors. Sharazade is developing the 1001 Nights website at the moment, and the new web link is just 1001nightspress.com. We’ve updated links in the old posts and added it to the blogroll (look in the links on the left-hand sidebar, towards the bottom).

Meanwhile, some poking about on the internet reveals Fulani’s writing is available at All Romance Ebooks (search on author name) and a couple of short stories are on 1 Place for Romance. Weirdly, All Romance Ebooks lists some stories and novellas twice, with different prices for different electronic formats. No idea why – we’re just pleased the stories are available in more places…

The Museum of Deviant Desires – out now

Cover image, The Museum of Deviant Desires

We’re delighted to announce that Fulani’s collection of short stories, The Museum of Deviant Desires, is out today. It’s published by 1001 Nights Press, the brainchild of erotica author Sharazade (who you’ll see sometimes as a commenter on previous posts here) and in the course of barely a couple of months it’s become established as one of the most innovative and successful small e-publishers around.

The blurb for the book is as follows:

Eleven erotic stories to excite, entertain, enthrall, and overstimulate the imagination. In no particular order, they cover the attractions of men’s adventure magazines with their sleazy sexploitation and politically incorrect pictures of tortured women; sex and bondage in an abandoned building and a burned-out car wreck; and sex, photography, and the internet. They investigate the sense of anticipation just before a corporal punishment scene, and what characters in bdsm stories think about the painful pleasures the author inflicts on them. They explore internet piracy and how royalties may be collected in the future. And they expose you to the late-night weirdness of sex, perversion, and fetish at a music festival. And then there’s the question of vacuum cleaners. Vacuum cleaners can be erotic in a technosexual kind of way.

Fulani is a master of erotic writing and a prolific author whose recent publications include the lesbian vampire novella “The Vampire Skye,” and stories of sex, fetish, and bondage in the bohemian world of “Hanging Around.” Rich with insights into the passion that attracts and binds, his distinctive dark erotica blends bdsm, fetish, and futuristic themes with imagination and humor.

In other words, expect a lot of bondage and bdsm, and a certain amount of strangeness involving vacuum cleaners. The title story is ‘The Museum of Deviant Desires’ but in its own way, the whole collection functions as exactly that kind of ‘museum’, presenting and exploring a bunch of different ideas related to bdsm and desire.

If you follow this blog, some of the stories will be a little familiar. Several have previously been published here (in fact, those versions are still here – we haven’t pulled them) or Fulani’s other blog (ditto) though there’s new content as well, and the previously-published stories have been re-edited, re-worked, extended, and in all but a couple of cases are now rather different from the originals.

The advantage of the book format, apart from the new content, is its appeal to a wider audience. And it’s a small enough amount of money ($3.99 if you’re buying in the US) for the convenience of having the stories collected in one easily-readable place rather than navigating back through 250-odd posts spread across two blogs.

As of a couple of hours ago it was only available on Smashwords but in the course of the next day or two expect to see it on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and a bunch of other places. We’ll post up the additional links as they come through.

*** Update: also now at 1eroticaebooks (pdf, prc, lit and epub formats) and Barnes & Noble (for Nook users), Amazon.com  and Amazon.co.uk. A couple more options to follow! ***

Thank you for your attention. Normal service will be resumed shortly!

The Daily Beast and the subconscious

We got a heads up a couple of days ago from a friend on Fetlife: the Daily Beast’s Newsweek magazine has an article ‘Spanking Goes Mainstream‘ (by Katy Roiphe, posted online Apr 16, 2012).

The standfirst says: ‘From the steamy bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey to HBO’s Girls, sexual domination is in vogue. Katie Roiphe on why women’s power at work may be fueling the craze.’

The essence of the piece is this. On the one hand, women are probably now more empowered than they ever have been. OK, that’s a gross generalisation that applies largely to Western societies and even them, not to all women. And it’s in the content of a society in which everyone, men and women alike, are having their economic and social life chances ripped up by what increasingly looks like a long-term crisis in capitalism. But in terms of income comparisons with men, educational attainment, etc., women are less dependent on men than ever. On the other hand, in terms of books, films and other cultural forms, and even in terms of the results of psychological surveys, Roiphe argues that there is a renewed popular interest in ‘the stylized theater of female powerlessness,’ a ‘romanticized, erotically charged, semipornographic idea of female submission,’ and a ‘watered-down, skinny-vanilla-latte version of sadomasochism.’

And the question is: why?

The article doesn’t deliver much that directly answers the question. But then almost no writing, popular or academic, does answer it properly. It’s a fair point that sexual fantasies reflect unconscious desires, and also explore the ‘what ifs’ that go beyond desire. It’s a fair point that sexual fantasies aren’t restricted by what we consider consciously to be politically correct. Fantasies are very often transgressive, imaginative and dreamlike explorations beyond the boundaries of lived experience and conventional morality. And yet they’re also socially structured in that they seem to rise and fall in popularity, and in their demographic incidence, in response to wider social changes.

So: no answers, but at least some interesting questions and provocative observations in the article. It’s worth a read.

Something to read and somewhere to go

Making her pay – front cover

A quick roundup of stuff here.

Firstly, Fulani’s short story ‘Filthy White Dress’ is just out in the Xcite collection Making Her Pay, a five-story ebook with works by (in order of appearance)  Veronica Wilde (her story title is also the collection title), Mary Borsellino, Fulani, Victoria Blisse and Maxim Jakubowski.

You may find it interesting because it’s the first time outside of this blog and Fulani’s other blog that he’s had any of his Nu Fetish-inspired work commercially published. If you want to know more about Nu Fetish, just check back a couple of posts on this blog and you’ll find more description and discussion of it.

Here’s how ‘Filthy White Dress’ begins:

Chloe sits in the Aztec Bar, sipping a mocha coffee. The bar is nowhere near Mexico – it’s on the third floor of a city centre hotel – and the name was probably chosen to reflect the gaudy décor in maroon and gold.

The men in suits who populate this bar, most of them networking, negotiating, buying or selling, look in Chloe’s direction occasionally. Their eyes register curiosity or, sometimes, lust. She knows what they’re thinking. They’re trying to work out if she’s someone’s mistress or lover, a professional escort waiting for a client, or a prostitute. They’re thinking this because she’s half their age, has out-of-the-bottle chestnut hair almost long enough to sit on, and wears a little black dress that shows a lot of leg and ankle boots with four-inch heels.

The fact is, she’s reading a book called Drama/Theatre/Performance and getting her head around the theories of action, alienation, catharsis, character and representation. She’s reading it on her Kindle, though, so for all anyone else in the room knows she could be reading some hot erotica.

She’s reading the book because she’s waiting for someone to come down from the fifth floor. 

And the blurb: Chloe doesn’t get the job. What she does get, by way of compensation, is dinner with the mysterious but attractive Dr. Vogel. He’s insistent she should wear a white dress, but it’s what he wants her to do while wearing it that’s kinky and slightly surreal. Their unlikely relationship flowers, though, and Chloe finds herself drawn into his colour-coded world.

The five-story collection is abstracted from a longer 20-story collection, Tricks for Kicks, which will be out in May – so look out for that as well.

Secondly: there’s a Festival of Erotic Arts in Edinburgh, Scotland, 22-24 June 2012: it’s ‘dedicated to the multi-disciplinary art forms which make up the Erotic Arts’. So there’s art, performance, cabaret, seminars, workshops, readings, short films, a workshop and a club night or two. Not sure yet if we’re going to be there ourselves (and we’re not involved in any of the events) but it’s a possibility because we’ve been planning a break in Scotland sometime in the summer anyway…