SexyHot
Discover the SexyHot reading list—a curated collection of bold, experimental fiction. Explore provocative works by Blake Butler, Diane Williams, and Robert Coover, including *Scorch Atlas* and *Pricksongs and Descants*. Dive into edgy, avant-garde literature that ignites the imagination.
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Airships
by Barry Hannah
Now considered a contemporary classic, Airships was honored by Esquire magazine with the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South -- a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.
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Flet
by Joyelle McSweeney
Flet is an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the oft-invoked Emergency, after which all public spaces are off-limits, is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression: the decentralized citizenry binge on endless, aimless file tape transmissions drained into their homes. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is set to go down at a mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation? An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination and syntax down to the speed of a narrative.
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Scorch Atlas
by Blake Butler
Scorch Atlas is a series of maps, or worlds, "tied so tight they couldn't crane their necks." Everything is either destroyed, rotting or festering--and nopt only the physical objects, but allegiances, hopes, covenants. The sole glimmer of light comes in recollection ... -- Cover.
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Pricksongs and Descants
by Robert Coover
Pricksongs & Descants, originally published in 1969, is a virtuoso performance that established its author - already a William Faulkner Award winner for his first novel - as a writer of enduring power and unquestionable brilliance, a promise he has fulfilled over a stellar career. It also began Coover's now-trademark riffs on fairy tales and bedtime stories. In these riotously word-drunk fictional romps, two children follow an old man into the woods, trailing bread crumbs behind and edging helplessly toward a sinister end that never comes; a husband walks toward the bed where his wife awaits his caresses, but by the time he arrives she's been dead three weeks and detectives are pounding down the door; a teenaged babysitter's evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies-her employer's, her boyfriend's, her own; an aging, humble carpenter marries a beautiful but frigid woman, and after he's waited weeks to consummate their union she announces that God has made her pregnant. Now available in a Grove paperback, Pricksongs & Descants is a cornerstone of Robert Coover's remarkable career and a brilliant work by a major American writer.
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Excitability
by Diane Williams
Excitability collects the best of Diane Williams's bold, often hilarious, stories of love, sex, child-rearing, death, and space aliens -- stories that are (in the words of Bradford Morrow) "wry, sensuous, spiritual, wise, raunchy, familial... alive to the contradictory nuances which define our lives."
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Epigraph
by Gordon Lish
Told through a series of letters written to various church volunteers, an account of a man reflecting on a particularly draining period of his life takes place after the death of his wife of several decades and presents an unflinching portrait of grief and its impact. IP.
