The Second Gates of Paradise: The Anthology of Erotic Short Fiction

Britta Santowski is a graduate student of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

Alberto Manguel’s second anthology of erotic short fiction contains 34
stories by 16 female writers and 18 male writers. The majority of male
writers originate from the United States, whereas the majority of female
writers are from such foreign countries as Israel (Yehudit Katzir),
Japan (Kono Taeko), and the former Yugoslavia (Dubravka Ugresic). The
six Canadian writers represented in the volume are Bonnie Burnard, Helen
Garner, Steven Heighton, Isabel Huggan, Robin Metcalfe, and Diane
Schoemperlen.

Despite Manguel’s introductory claim that “the erotic act is
fraught with dangers,” many of the short stories avoid crossing from
the permissible to the dark and unforbidden world of the imagination.
Manguel’s version of erotica includes numerous love-and-marriage
stories like Colette’s “One Evening” and John Updike’s
“Wife-Wooing.” There are some exceptions to the squeaky-clean
erotica: Allan Gurganus’s “Adult Art” intertwines homoerotic
fantasy with physical involvement; Tennessee Williams’s “Desire and
the Black Masseur” explores pain, pleasure, and death; Dubravka
Ugresic’s “A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun” offers a humorous,
nontraditional look at phallus-worship.

Each story is preceded by an intrusive editorial preamble whose purpose
is unclear. For stories that venture beyond the conventional, the
preamble seems to be used to justify the story’s inclusion. In
“Monkeybites,” for instance, the preamble appears to rationalize the
lesbian content that follows by discussing Sappho and Radclyffe Hall.
Robin Metcalfe’s “The Shirt,” in which a young man acts on a
homoerotic fantasy while alone in a dressing room, is preceded by an
“objective” discussion of the 16th-century Portuguese merchants who
introduced the term “fetish.”

This hefty anthology offers the reader sanitized erotica, ready for
classroom application.