To write about a personal love affair in an extended way. The Latin poet Catullus was the first poet in the ancient world THE BEAR CAME OVER THE MOUNTAIN Alice Munro WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE SOMETHING THAT NEEDS NOTHING Miranda July THE MOON IN ITS FLIGHT Gilbert Sorrentino SOME OTHER, BETTER OTTO Deborah Eisenberg THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG Anton Chekhov (Feb.Great Love Stories, from chekhov to munroįIRST LOVE AND OTHER SORROWS Harold Brodkey Not simply titillating, this book's range of voices, eras and settings provides a fascinating and revealing history of how sexuality in America has changed over the last half-century. Nevertheless, taking into account the current glut of uneven erotica anthologies, this is a refreshing entry: a quality literary collection of beautifully written pieces that happen to be about sex. In their original context, these ''good parts'' would have climaxed a narrative here, they produce a rich, sometimes overstimulating effect. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and a sultry passage from The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos. Other high points include a romantic but realistic excerpt from E.L. Pat Califia's ''What Girls Are Made Of,'' from the aptly named collection Melting Point, is a dark and stylish peephole look into the s&m lesbian scene involving women named Poison, Killer and Bo. Amy Bloom's ''Only You'' follows a quirky encounter between a married North Carolina woman and her cross-dressing lover. Homes's ''Chunky in Heat.'' Once-shocking stories such as Harold Brodkey's meditation on a young woman's first orgasm, ''Innocence,'' blaze beside lyrical entries by Michael Chabon, Susan Sontag, Don DeLillo and William Styron. There are contemporary scorchers as well, like Mary Gaitskill's ''Processing,'' or A.M.

What Blair deems the best erotic scenes in the last 50 years of American literature have been collected in this ambitious anthology, with some of the 46 sexy pieces excerpted from such classic novels as Saul Bellow's 1954 groundbreaking The Adventures of Augie March and Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire.

Innocence by harold brodkey online