Did I pick up this book explicitly because I saw Roxane Gay listed as an author? Yes.
Did this meet my expectations? No...?

I expected more I guess, like the stories were honestly captivating and I found them truly interesting. But I felt left wanting it to be more SPICEY.
While the stories in this collection are something if showed up in my run of the mill book, I'd be less than pleased. But being this book is labeled as Erotica, and named Kink I expected more spice to this book.

TLDR: if you're looking for smut this probably won't meet your expectations.

Like most anthologies, Kink: Stories was a mixed bag, though it's certainly enjoyable for its novelty alone (its thesis being that erotica has a place in literary fiction). I found the preponderance of stories about BDSM started to get a little boring after a while, but this was otherwise a refreshing collection that I enjoyed spending time with.

I felt the stories that were the most successful were the ones that contextualized the characters’ kinks—I don’t mean that in a ‘every kink comes from a fucked up childhood’ kind of way; I mean that your life and your sex life are part of the same whole and some of these stories were more interested in interrogating that intersection than others.

The two absolute stand-outs were Brandon Taylor's Oh, Youth (tender, devastating) and Carmen Maria Machado's The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror (weird, sensual)--incidentally the two longest stories in the collection. The other surprising highlight for me was Trust by Larissa Pham, an author I'd never heard of, whose Vermont-set story I found evocative and effectively moving.

The less said about Roxane Gay's Reach the better, and a handful of other stories fell flat too, mostly the ones that lacked interiority of any kind. You could tell that a lot of these authors wanted to forgo character and dive straight into Commentary About Desire, and I always found that much less effective.

(Also, anyone looking forward to new Garth Greenwell should know that his story, Gospodar, is a chapter taken straight from Cleanness--I ended up skipping it when I realized I recognized what I was reading as I hadn't particularly enjoyed that chapter the first time.)

Bottom line is that it's honestly worth the price of admission for Taylor and Machado, but otherwise it didn't totally reach its promising potential.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

I think I was expecting something different with this book. It was much more abstract than a straight up romance book. That doesn't mean I didn't appreciate it...There was a lovely bit of writing and a lot of it was very insightful. I enjoyed the essays and the book overall.

Kink
I do not even know where to begin…
.
I will say I can’t speak for the whole book only the 4-5 stories I read, I did not finish at 32%. It just was not for me. I was hoping for some entertaining stories with some “hotness” in between. I wanted these stories to be fun and to be able to feel what the characters were feeling and imagine the what if’s…. but to me the stories did not do that and seemed rather depressing.

**Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a complimentary copy of Kink in exchange for my honest review. **

I was very excited to see a short story collection about kink. I think it's a topic that is very taboo. I was even more excited to say the list of authors including Roxane Gay and Carmen Maria Machado. While I enjoyed the short story collection it was exactly what I expected. I thought itd be smuttier. But it was more cerebral and surrounded the mindsets of the people involved. I think if you go in expecting more of a book that "takes kink seriously" you will enjoy it.

I definitely enjoyed the ideas of power, agency, and identity through out.

Tw: rape in Gospodar by Garth Greenwell

I think this book could do well if the audience knows what to expect going in. It's very cerebral and if you go into for a collection of skilled authors around the topic of sex and introspection and humanity in its many variations—good, bad, happy and not—then this will be an interesting book and will lend itself to great discussions.

This book just wasn't for me. Each story that I read seemed to have some sort of depressing element to it. I skipped ahead to an author that I have enjoyed in the past, but that story also fell short for me. While I personally didn't enjoy the book, I can easily see how others enjoy it. The writing was great, and very artistic.

This collection holds space for literature that, in the words of R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, the editors, “takes kink seriously.” And it does. There’s a range of voices here that each expands, humanizes, complicates, enriches, and subverts traditional notions of kink, of what it can be, what it can look and feel like for “embodied persons in the world…engaging with personal and social histories,” as Greenwell has said in an interview. It occasions an exploration of how, contrary to popular stigma or conception, BDSM and “othered” sex practices are hardly monolithic, hardly limited to purely physical experiences or confined by simple binaries such as dom/sub. The collection de-caricatures kink, celebrates it, offers a window into the endless textures and terrains of play and love and intimacy. It assures us that sex (in literature) can be dynamic, many-layered, psychological.

I’m happy about the refreshing mix of writers in these pages—predominantly writers of color, queer writers, women. As with any anthology, not all the stories landed the same for me, but that’s not to say that I wasn’t challenged or delighted by each of them, because I was.

Kink explores the world of kinks. BDSM, D/s, bondage, objectification, humiliation, denial. It was a really nice anthology of different scenes, different atmospheres, different people searching for different things within the same spectrum of kink.

I love short stories, I love erotic stories. I did not feel the chemistry in the various characters displayed. I could not feel their feelings and the touch they were experiencing. I think this would be amazing read for someone new to the erotic fiction world. It is sweet and syrupy. I prefer hard core. There is nothing wrong with sweet and sugary. It just isn't my thing.

After reading so much bad sex, I was really looking forward to this anthology. There are some notable names, so I had high hopes that this would actually be a pleasant experience (unlike some I’ve had recently- ahem, Den of Vipers). However, I was mostly let down.

The collection is very literary. Even in a book about kinky sex, there isn’t actually a lot of sex- at all- in many of the stories. The stories aren’t so much about the kinks or the sex but about some other, deeper emotion or moment that the characters are either trying to understand or live up to or just forget. They’re really trying to process those emotions through sex and sometimes that’s interesting. Most of the time it’s just…excessive. And kind of boring; the last piece is a literal essay and let me just say that’s the disappointing cherry on top of my melted sundae.

I will admit that when there is sex, most of it’s not disappointing, from a writing stand point. It’s well written and it doesn’t sugar coat anything, body parts or actions. That, and the fact this is a very diverse anthology is why it gets two stars instead of one. I appreciate the fact that it covers a plethora of sex between various genders and sexualities.

I really wanted to like this collection, I really, really did. I was so excited when I saw Roxane Gay and Carmen Maria Machado’s names, but even their stories let me down more than they resonated, like much of their other writings I’ve read.

I just wanted more from this anthology. I also expected it to be way more kinkier than it was! I think the kinkiest things were a kink con and a couple visiting a dominatrix even if they stayed amongst the con-goers for all of about 15 minutes and nothing came about in the couple’s relationship. Also, trigger warning: one story culminates in rape, which is not something I thought this anthology would publish considering it’s espousing kink as a way to reclaim oneself as opposed to being seen as something practiced exclusively by criminals. That’s the literal exact opposite! That story started off fairly well but devolved quickly. It really came out of nowhere and I was totally taken aback. This collection really didn’t need it and I think it’s presence is, overall, ironic and antithetical to the greater message and goals of that anthology.

Overall, I like the fact that this anthology reads in a similar vein of Fat & Queer, but it takes the “literary” part of its genre way too literal.

Kink was definitely different from my usual style of reading, but I like to step outside my normal boundaries sometimes and see what I'm missing. The writing is certainly top-notch, if the content was not exactly to my personal taste.

A very interesting and diverse group of authors getting down and dirty with this anthology, "Kink". I think the best stories were from authors: Roxane Gay, Melissa Febos, Brandon Taylor, and Carmen Maria Machado. Some of the other stories fell short. Others were just average. This book won't be for everyone. Might be disturbing to some, but overall the majority of the stories were sexy and hilarious.

If you wanted a Fifty Shades that was bite-sized episodes, queer, and well-written, your desires have been answered. Several authors, some quite well known, turn their attention to a side of intimacy still just on the outskirts of mainstream culture. These stories will challenge, inform, and excite.

DNF at 38% didn’t enjoy as much as I thought I would, I might give it a second chance, but I don’t know!

I thought this was a very interesting collection of stories that really looked at the emotional aspects of human sexuality. I really enjoyed the stories by some of my favorite authors (I will read anything Carmen Maria Machado writes) and I also really enjoyed The Cure, which was the opening story. I’ll admit I didn’t really understand the last 2 stories and it was sort of an underwhelming note to end on.

These stories were sensuous, touching, and thought-provoking. A fascinating collection, unlike any I’ve come across before.

Kink is a collection of 15 short stories that encompass so many different aspects of kink. The stories themselves evoke sensuality, sexuality, intimacy, and intensity.

Overall, I found the collection solid writing-wise. The subject matter and various viewpoints kept things interesting. I found a few stories boring and almost skipped past them. There were however a handful of amazing stories that I didn't want to end. The Best Friendster Date ever was incredibly sexy, and intense. Reach was amazing and intimate, and I loved the characters. The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror (what a name, right?!) was the standout for me. It was atmospheric and mysterious, and the characters were well fleshed-out.

I think if you're a fan of short stories and are at all interested or intrigued by kink you would be into this book. The beauty of this short story collection is that there's bound to be something you would enjoy... Especially if you like being bound.

3.5 stars!

They say variety is the spice of life. Perhaps variety is the kink of life as well? A spicy read with a story for everyone. It's always interesting to have my "norms" challenged and seeing real people interact in real ways was a delight!

This is a short story collection I was super intrigued by when I first heard about it—I love the subject matter boundaries this is pushing in literary fiction and the range of content explored. Stylistically, it’s a collection where most stories worked for me—they are moment driven or deep dives into small windows of the characters depicted. My favorites are stories that used language in as sensory and sensual a way as the content they depicted, the tensions and edge palpable particularly in SCISSORS by Kim Fu and THE LOST PERFORMANCE OF THE HIGH PRIESTESS OF THE TEMPLE OF HORROR by Carmen Maria Machado.
.
Another story that stood out on my read was IMPACT PLAY by Peter Mountford, perhaps for its ability plot wise to take me in a completely different direction than that which I’d first felt I was headed as a reader. I always enjoy when a writer can do that in short story form given the limitations of time!
.
While I think readers picking this up will be as captivated by what these stories cover (given the content I’d think the pearl-clutches would steer well clear), I also think there’s a real joy in the way language is used and how complexly themes like desire and shame are explored across the collection.
.
Many thanks to the publisher for a review copy via netgalley.