Best American Erotica 1995

For the third year in a row, Bright, a well-known lecturer and writer on human sexuality, brings us a brand-new, skin-tingling potpourri of stories you won't hear told at the dinner table. These kinky tales are not for the easily offended, and there are quite a number of unusual couplings: Jay Michaelson's feverish relationship between a girl and a boy-turned-wolf in ``The Spirit That Denies'' and Renee M. Charles's portrait of a female vampire on the job at a 24-hour underground barber shop in ``Cinnamon Roses.'' Other stories range from James Williams's amusing ``Daddy,'' in which a wife plays at being a baby for her husband; to Mary Malmrose's thought-provoking ``For Love or Money,'' which depicts a world where slavery is one way to pay off debt; to the chilling ``Absolution'' by Tom Caffrey, about a Nazi who pays penance in the most personal, humiliating way he can. The contributors will be new to most people, with the exceptions of the well-known Robert Olen Butler and Nicholson Baker-the latter represented by an excerpt from The Fermata. This anthology, even more than the last, explores a myriad of sexual possibilities sharing very little except a disdain for conventional and a concern for safe sex. (Oct.)