4 stars rounded up! [3.66 if you want to be exact]

I loved reading this anthology. Yes, some stories were less successful for me, but I was genuinely bummed when I got to the Acknowledgements section. At under 300 pages, Kink is just long enough to explore how bottomless the subject is and how it transforms depending on who’s looking and where they’re standing.

My all-around favourites were Brandon Taylor’s ‘Oh, Youth’, Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror’ and Chris Kraus’ ‘Emotional Technologies’. The first two weren’t really a surprise as they seem to be a lot of people’s favourites. Taylor does the aesthetics of loneliness so well, it’s painfully lovely. He writes desire and WASPs like no other and every one of his scenes could be a painting.

Machado’s story is exactly what it says it is: over the top, dramatic and Fun. The writing is lush and endlessly quotable and the set building of interbellum Paris overwhelms in a good way. If Machado explores the theatricality of eroticism through an actual theatre [Kim Fu’s ‘Scissors’ is another perspective on this], Kraus comes out and point-blank compares BDSM to commedia dell’arte. Her story looks more like a piece of cultural criticism and that really worked for me. I’ve never read anything of hers before and I’m glad I have a bunch of stuff to discover.

Related, another new to me author is Callum Angus. His story ‘Canada’ was the only one that actually made me cry. His prose is poetic and very light. I want to read everything he’s ever written or going to write. Melissa Febos takes you by the throat and shakes you in ‘The Cure’. Having it be the opening story was a very clever editorial choice.

‘Trust’ by Larissa Pham, ‘The Voyeurs’ by Zeyn Joukhadar and ‘Mirror, Mirror’ by Vanessa Clark were also up there for me. The rest, I found either to be a bit emotionless or that I needed something more from them.

I hope that R. O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell team up again for future projects because I really enjoyed myself.

This is a short story collection based around feelings and various sexual practices.

With the title I did expect most of the stories to be explicit. They weren't. Some were in places but some weren't and in some it felt like the explicitness was an afterthought. A couple of them had tremendous emotional depth with a great literary quality.

Enjoyable, will surprise you.

This collection of avant-garde short stories is exactly what I wanted to read. I laughed out loud, cringed, and was moved in equal measure. A brilliant collection of some of our finest writers.

This collection of sexy short stories features a whole load of the big names of American queer fiction, but it’s kind of a mixed bag. Some I loved, some I found interesting, and there were a couple that I thought were just not great. My favourites were the stories from Brandon Taylor and Carmen Maria Machado, who both cultivated a story I was enthralled with around the required kinkiness of the theme. I was also interested by how many of the authors looked to nature, particularly birds, for their imagery, and I wondered if that wasn’t all because we’ve been stuck inside, watching nature from afar, this past year.

As with all short story fiction anthologies, some of the stories are a hit and others are a bit of a miss. But you take that gamble with any sort of collection. Overall I thought most stories were engaging and well developed and it certainly adds to the library of erotica. I enjoyed it and feel it's a necessary book for any public library to buy to add to their adult fiction section.

Short story anthology on the theme of desire.

The stories explore the spectrum of desire, the communication and understanding of that desire, plus love, sex, power-play and power-dynamics.

At times erotic, occasionally challenging, this is an astonishing literary collection which brings together some of the most provocative and stimulating writers around today.

Stand outs for me are ‘Trust’ – Larissa Pham, ‘Safeword’ – R.O.Kwon, ‘Scissors’ – Kim Fu, and ‘The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror’ – Carmen Maria Machado.

Sensuous and exciting.

My thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster UK for the ARC.

“To everyone who’s ever felt out of place because of what your body wanted this book is for you.”

I honestly loved this book and it’s very relatable mixture of stories. In a time where many of us are unable to socialise among our communities as we would like. This book took me to such a happy place, almost nostalgic. It felt like I was exchanging stories with friends. Stories of fantastic connections, intense with pleasure but also the ever so common miscommunication, embarrassing moments and the more traumatic where the lines become blurred and people taken advantage of.

I would have loved to see a broader representation across the kinky ‘spectrum’, but that is my only criticism.

I’ve now gone ahead and preordered a hard copy as I can’t imagine a better fitting book to sit on my bookshelf as it’s certainly one I’d crave again.

This probably isn’t a collection of short stories that I would have sought out but when you come across something like this and you have an enquiring mind then you have to take a look. The stories seem to cover a wide range of what might be termed BDSM activities which means anything drawn from a menu covering bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism and masochism. The characters all have a need to express themselves in one or more of these ways but most of them have found it difficult or have simply not found the right partners.

In one way, that makes the stories rather sad because the people in them often seem slightly lost but, then in another way, most of the plots are about finding their way to some kind of accommodation with someone else. There are some fairly explicit descriptions of activities which might seem quite bizarre to many readers but those who are already interested will know their way around.

I particularly liked the first story, The Cure by Melissa Febos, about a woman, probably bisexual, slowly finding out what she likes. It’s strange, quite funny in places but insightful about the role of women in sex and how easy it is to exchange heterosexual domination and expectation with any other kind. It’s really a story about power.

The other stories don’t quite live up to this one but they’re still interesting. I suppose that if I have a reservation a lot of them are about things being done to women, many of them painful – genuinely – and while that might be temporarily fulfilling, there’s something not quite right about it either long term or politically. This is particularly so when the pain is being administered by men who clearly get off on it.

It’s an interesting read – enjoyable if you’re into that kind of thing – and it might be fun to delve into it on the morning commute as the title is quite upfront and it could upset the Central Line! Otherwise, as the editors say, the book fills a gap where this kind of fiction is usually marginalised and that can’t be a bad thing.

This is an intriguing collection of stories, namely ones part-edited by a great writer, Garth Greenwell. The book’s title may put some people off, it shouldn’t: this is [generally] a well-written collection which deals with ‘kink’ in myriad ways.

Here, readers will find an employed ‘sex slave’ who spends his summer living with an older straight couple - but when the husband falls in love with the younger male, things come to a sudden end. The opening tale deals with the complexities of thinking you want something, then thinking you don’t, before switching again — and even though, as with some others here, there is some gratuitous sex, it’s well-written: miles away from ‘Fifty Shades’ and similar books of that ilk. One of the latter stories sees racism - and prejudice more generally - woven into the story of a male-female couple who’ve have transitioned. What is particularly thought-provoking is how small-minded people can be, something many of us have likely experienced.

Towards the end, some of the stories are less compelling; some try too hard, or are over-long. Still, it’s perhaps a matter of personal choice so I’ll leave you to make your own decision.

‘Kink’ is an unusual collection and a refreshing change - so if you’re intrigued, fascinated, ambivalent, or anything else, the stories are certainly worth reading.

I was not sure entirely what to expect from this collection at first, but was drawn in by the contributors to this book (including some big names like Roxanne Gay and Garth Greenwell) and how these stories might all connect to the title 'Kink'.

The title of this collection may intrigue and repel people in equal measure, but essentially it goes far deeper than just a group of stories about sex. Indeed, these stories cover a broad range of identities, thoughts and sexual practices, and use sex and/or kinks as springboards to wider discussions about gender, sexuality, identity, worth and society, among many other topics.

From a story about a trans character's relationship to their body after top surgery, to a gay man reconciling his own spiralling self-esteem with the seeming opposites of his desire to be a sub and to be safe, to a whole host of other characters understanding their place in society and in various groups through what sex they have or don't have, and want or don't want, this collection pulls together a truly diverse range of outlooks, bodies and desires, and is all the more powerful for it.

Although not every story hit me the same, as an overall collection, the quality is very high, and there were not any stories that I actively disliked. And the stories I did like truly made this whole collection absolutely worth reading. This is a collection that deserves your time and attention, and will linger in your mind after.

I received a free advance copy of the book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

I went into this book expecting to absolutely love it but finished it feeling slightly disappointed.

This book is worth reading for Carmen Maria Machado's story alone and there are a few other interesting stories but many felt like they fell short of what they were trying to communicate.

Not my usual type of book to be honest but as a fan of Carmen Maria Machado and Roxanne Gay I was intrigued. It was a mixed bag, some stories I liked, some I just found dull and lacking. I expected more, it was actually quite light on the kink which was a disappointment. The stories I did enjoy were from Carmen Maria Machado, R.O. Kwan and Melissa Febos.

An anthology of sexual desire, love and exploration, Kink is a diverse and imagined look into a world often kept securely behind closed doors.

This was certainly, well, kinky. But it was also a lot more. Most of the stories explore the complexities of sexual desire, the confusion, the confidence, the wide range of sexual interests that exist in human nature. No-one has a singular experience of sex and this anthology demonstrates this eloquently. I have never read an anthology so rich in diversity. My favourite, by far, was Carmen Maria Machado's piece.

Like Most short story collections. A couple I loved. A couple I hated. The majority were entertaining. This is a collection of stories as the title suggests that has some form of Kink in it. Therefore theirs lots of steamy scenes within it. Theirs also in my opinion some relationships that go into the realm of non consensual behaviour.

Some of the stories in this collection were stunning! I think Kim Fu's Scissors was particularly good at embodying, literally & metaphorically, the experience of absolute trust, the threat, the fantasy that make sense as a paradigm of kink for me.

The other stories that struck me, both ones that I enjoyed & one that I found particularly distressing, felt more ambiguous, lingered on the places where fantasies of power asymmetry are borrowed from real & violent social dynamics, where desires & needs & limits are mismatched or un-communicated, where mutuality and respect falter, or fail. I thought both Larissa Pham's Trust and Brandon Taylor's Oh, Youth were beautiful & lonely-feeling examples of the vulnerability of a complicated, not-entirely-okay experience of power-play. I also thought Garth Greenwell's Gospodar was an intense, bruising confrontation with this ambiguity, one that I personally think should probably involve a content warning for rape (am not opposed to the story itself, or to its presence in this collection, it was just hard to read & I wasn't expecting it).

Ultimately, I think I felt at odds w the collection before I picked it up & moving through it I also felt increasingly uncertain as to whether i was reading it wrong.

Mostly I think the answer is 'yes'. Recent online discussion, including a very good thread by one of my friends, has raised a lot of questions about kink for me, about what social dynamics kink reproduces & about the resistance to unpacking why & how kinks exist, and this book is not intended or written to answer those questions. As someone who hasn't seriously considered it before, now was maybe the worst time to pick up this specific collection, because I have absolutely no structure to my thoughts, just a general question mark!

But I also think there's a little bit of 'no' in there, because the framing of the intro feels -- not misleading, but maybe confusing? It raises a couple of themes that I kept worrying over as I read, the theme of kink as a 'complex, psychologically rich act of communication' & also of attempting to join solitudes across a distance. To me, many of the stories felt fundamentally solitary, these intimate experiences & occasionally betrayals locking people into themselves, communication failing. Definitely not all, but a significant number, enough to jar me.

All this to say, I clearly have complicated & as yet not fully worked through feelings, but there are a lot of very strong pieces collected here and authors that I'm looking forward to reading more from.