In the introduction for KINK the editors R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell said In many of these stories, kink can also deepen and complicate urgent conversations around how consent is established, negotiated and sometimes broken. KINK is a collection of short stories written by some of today’s favorite writers. As stated in the introduction, majority of the stories explores sex, consent, agency, desires, deep dark desires and coping. Yes! These stories will have you clutching your pearls and fan...

Greenwell and Kwon have teamed up to give us a short story collection with a clear mission: "Instead of pathologizing kink, the stories in this anthology treat it as a complex, psychologically rich act of communication." While there are of course some weaker and some stronger stories in this 15 piece collection, the majority is captivating and impressive, also the pieces by lesser known authors - and I confess: I have initially been drawn to the book by the big names that feature as contributors...

‘’Bristol, Vermont. Summer - the flies biting. Vermont is named for its green mountains, the man tells her. To her, they look like sleeping animals with soft pelts. With the windows of the rental car down, it smells like cows, so they roll them up. The light has a weight to it. She squints against the sun. They have come to the mountains to get away from the city, where life feels unbearable. She has just dyed her hair blonde and it is parched and fine, like straw. Too yellow, also like straw

Wow this was such a slog I can’t believe how bored I was by this! This felt so much like someone from the “cool kids club” of current famous writers was like what if I try writing a story that’s a little bit “bad boy” and we put them all together, except all of the stories are exactly the same!! There was maybe one I liked, but now I can’t even remember which bc they all ran together. Because! ever depiction of kink was exactly the same. Supposedly for celebrating like the diversity of kink ever...

So, THIS was kink? Meh. I've read kinkier. I was definitely in the wrong place here, as I was expecting a mouth watering, tantalising and even a slightly disgusting collection of stories about people that enjoy and deliberately seek out, kinky sex. Unfortunately, I honestly felt like the sex involved was mostly not consented to, and riddled with abuse. That is not how I roll.I wanted a foot fetish or two, some bondage, a little role play and to top it off, a good nylon fetish. Who doesn't love n...

Audiobook....narrated by a full cast of readers. “You can’t get enough of what you don’t need”Love, sex, desire, unfulfilled desires, fantasies, BDSM, dungeons, bondage, cuffs, ropes, riding crops, dominatrix, submissive, attraction, personal satisfaction, insatiable hunger, disappointments, empowerment, shame, masturbation, penetration, orgasm, voyeurism, hooking up, dating, lesbian sex, couple exploration, safe words, truth, trust....“Kink” explores ‘kinky sex’ ....These anthologies are tastef...

The second I heard about this anthology, I knew I needed to read it. The subject matter is right up my alley and the list of contributors is just incredible. The book did not disappoint in the slightest. Of course, when it comes to anthologies there will always be stories that work better for me than others but I genuinely thought all of these stories did something interesting.The biggest surprise was Trust by Larissa Pham which I found emotionally resonant and super well-written – by an author

Disclaimer- I have only read 60% of this book. That was enough. I received this book from Netgalley but hadn’t read it until an article by one of the editors appeared in The Guardian on 9th February 2021. I am saddened and honestly disturbed by how much it fails to deliver on the editors’ promises. The book is advertised as an antidote to romance novels and/or erotic novels that portray characters with kinks as mentally ill and unsafe, but more than one story features clear boundary-breaking and...

FINAL REVIEW: I believe that the initial mini-review I gave on Goodreads was incorrect. This is what i had said: “Is it just me or do most of these stories not fit into the introduction's criteria? I think most of the stories are quite strong, but the introduction is what makes them feel like they're a letdown. Judge them on their own and they're very good. I did enjoy the collection as I went along but only after I decided to dismiss the introduction's supposed intentions.”I think this is untru...

a mixed bag of a collection but a lot of fun overall

I dunno. If I'm being honest it feels like all the cool kids got together to prove they were better than everyone else and then weren't?The stories are... fine. In my years of reading for the Over the Rainbow Booklist, I definitely encountered better - the problem with doing this in short story form is that you can either develop the story and characters or the activities and most of these stories do the latter. I've always felt including sex, even kink, should tell us something other than that

Despite the long list of impressive authors contributing to this book and the provocative subject matter, I was left disappointed. Unfortunately this wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted to be shocked and intrigued and maybe even disgusted but I just wasn't.As always some stories were better than others and I think my favourite was Chris Kraus's and Carmen Maria Machado's was definitely interesting. The others didn't stand out to me and almost blended together.

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...

A mixed collection. Some of the stories are really great and some weren’t for me. I loved how queer the book was and how diverse the characters were. Some of kink got redundant.

For years my father had joked it was because of The Box one had to be 18 to enter the basement. Ironically enough boxing had prompted its purchase, but its popularity – and infamy – would be due to its “other” offerings. Which makes sense considering those additional benefits included round-the-clock, crystal-clear (read: NOT scrambled), standard definition (it was the 90’s) porn. And I don’t just mean porn like in the soft-core Skinemax sense, either. Seems antiquated now. These days kids get t...

The much hyped Kink is much less kinky than its title lets on. Kink is a collection of stories, written by a coterie of some of the most acclaimed writers of today, that orbit around an attempt to pull back the covers of human desire. This desire - as in the case of Alexander Chee's and R.O. Kwon's stories - can be kinky, but in the case of several other tales, kink is mysteriously absent. The stories are diverse and varied; the backgrounds and experiences come from multiple racial and gender...

3.25/5. My favourite story was definitely Oh, Youth by Brandon Taylor, but I also really enjoyed The Voyeurs by Zeyn Joukhadar, Trust by Larissa Pham and The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror by Carmen Maria Machado.

I wanted to love this, I wanted this to be a book that would let me discover something new. Unfortunately this wasn’t it. Kink is a collection of short stories from several different authors and in each one the narrator has some kind of sexual “kink”. Some of the stories I actually enjoyed while others I felt we’re lacking. I definitely thought it would be dirtier, and I guess I wanted it to be kinkier? It felt very light in that regard. If you’re looking for a quick read with some (lightly) kin...

A collection of fifteen short stories, edited by Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon, Kink is a diverse collection by a wide variety of authors. Truly something for everyone. As the editors state in the foreword: the stories treat kink as a “rich act of communication” and “explore the whole gamut of human feelings”.My favorite is Oh, Youth, Brandon Taylor’s piece on being a seasonal rent boy. An architecture student, the main character pays his bills by spending summers with married couples who are lo...

2.75 stars.Most of the stories in this collection were a miss for me, unfortunately. I found a lot of them to not have much depth when considered as a short story and the more explicit aspects of most of the stories did not really engage me or feel unique when compared to the collection as a whole. There were a few stories I really enjoyed, in part because they had more meat in terms of a narrative or ideas presented, which include Melissa Febos’s “The Cure,” “Safeword” by R. O. Kwon, “Oh Youth”...