Too Beautiful and Other Stories 2 Ed

Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: I finished reading Too Beautiful yesterday, and I can only amplify my initial praise for this smart, sexed up, totally wrong book. Delicious. Transgressive. Hot. Pritchard's stories never settle into either of the predominant camps of dirty books, on the one hand "Letters to Penthouse" frat-boy fantasies, or the limp erotica of the "gossamer-and-moonbeams" school on the other. (Though Pritchard evidently started out writing youthful imitations of the latter variety, including a story involving blueberries, described with charming self-deprecation in the Afterword.) Favorite stories are "Pretend," an extended D/s fantasy, "Too Beautiful," in which an aggressive narrator finds himself subtly dominated (and loving it!) and "Lizza," a feverish, hallucinatory chronicle of incestuous siblings whose appetites for transgression lead them from ferocious copulation to a violent crime spree. The collection isn't just porn, though -- the stories stand up (beautifully) to comparisons with more straight-laced contemporary short prose fiction. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad. Sometimes both at once. And always filthy.

Rating:
Summary: Non-erotica reader loves this book
Review: My wife purchased this book and suggested I read a few of the stories, and I was pleasantly surprised. Pritchard manages to not only make erotica more literary but also to push boundaries without seeming to just push the pure shock method. So often anything even slightly out of the ordinary comes across as nothing but an attempt to shock you and leave it at that. Sometimes he titillates. Sometimes he shocks. But never does he leave it at that. The stories have substance and extend beyond some initial sense of shock. He writes believable characters and writes with intelligence. That is perhaps the sexiest element of his writing.

Rating:
Summary: a voyeur's delite
Review: Reading this book brings gut reactions - titillation, shock, excitment. The author's
elegant, spare prose makes the characters vividly alive and
believable. Each story is different, it's like walking
into various rooms in a building where each room holds
a naughty surprise. Each story leaves one thinking "and what next???".
You won't be disappointed.