Susie Bright Presents Three the Hard Way: Erotic Novellas » (3 Novellas-in-One Volume)

Susie Bright is the editor of The Best American Erotica series and host of the weekly audio show In Bed with Susie Bright on Audible.com. She has been a columnist for Playboy and Salon, and has been profiled in USA TODAY, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. An international lecturer on sexuality and feminism, she won the 2004 Writer of the Year Award at the Erotic Awards in London. Ms. Bright lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Susie Bright Presents: Three the Hard Way

Erotic Novellas by William Harrison, Greg Boyd, and Tsaurah Litzky

Pull down the shades and settle in for pleasure with this trio of erotic novellas -- handpicked by Susie Bright -- showcasing stories that are hot and masterful.

Susie Bright, hailed by The New York Times as "the avatar of American erotica," is the undisputed grandmaster of the genre. Now she has handpicked three rising stars -- new masters -- whose stories will delight, arouse, and captivate you.

Connected by a central theme -- the idea that one sexual moment can change a person forever -- each story is wildly different from anything you have read before.

In "Shadow of a Man," Emmy Award-winning writer William Harrison takes us to South Africa, where a photographer who thinks he's seen -- and done -- it all begins an intense affair with the daughter of a famous general. "The Motion of the Ocean" is Tsaurah Litzky's undaunted story about a woman's coming-of-age from her adolescence in the 1960s to the over-the-top sexuality of the 1990s. Greg Boyd's "The Widow" is about the consequences that transpire when a husband reads an erotic novel that his wife has been writing in secret. In it, she has fantasized the outrageous sexual experiences of a widow.

Sensual, provocative, funny, and profound, Three the Hard Way is a pleasure trove of great finds discovered by America's most trusted name in erotica.

Kirkus Reviews

Editor Bright asks three writers to face a life-changing sexual event. Most skilled here is William Harrison (the magnetic Mountains of the Moon, the magnificent The Blood Latitudes), who often writes about Africa when not presenting a futuristic action fantasy like The Roller Ball Murders. In "Shadow of a Man," set in South Africa the year before Mandela's release, Texan photographer Cal Vega is invited to Johannesburg to photograph an elderly retired general; his daughter wants the picture. Cal is a philosopher of the camera and has intriguing if cynical views about his art. Ellen, the general's daughter, seduces Cal and takes him off to her beachfront home. Her sexual enjoyment turns on fantasy: she's 15 and Cal is her 14-year-old brother, and so on. She takes him to a big party, mixed whites and blacks, and the real object of her seduction turns out to be that she wants many pictures of those at the party, because one is a mole. All turns tragic, and Cal's thoughts focus on the shadow within, and on his stupid, stupid, stupid philosophy. Greg Boyd, relating "The Widow," splits his page in half and on the top tells of "Karen Regent," a widow who secretly writes a pornographic novel to make up for her nonorgasmic life, while on the bottom Boyd simultaneously tells her husband's story after discovering and reading the book on the wife's hard drive. In Karen's novel, she goes off to France to recover from grief, discovers masturbation, and is seduced by a French photographer. In the sub-story, the shocked husband, not dead, tells of reading his wife Mandy's tale and his rock-hard erection. Rawest of all, Tsaurah Litzky's "The Motion of the Ocean" leaps from her brother's bar mitzvah to 30years later as the heroine more or less makes sense of her sex life while fitting photos into a fat new album. More sex in this one than in the other two combined. Smartly done, at times deeply felt.