Little Birds: Erotica
By: Anas Nin
The call has gone out now for "books for fans of" the hugely-read Fifty Shades of Grey series. The public library has one such list available on the website (www.lib.pg.bc.ca, under the "Book Lists" toggle) and you'll see many more online and in newspapers as publishers hover, hoping for a scrap from the Fifty Shades table of popular erotica.
The demand for this literature is so overwhelming right now - and easy for headline writers, that in spite of my personal belief that some much more deserving works may be being overlooked, I feel impelled to recommend another titillating title that may be just the thing for those wanting more in the vein of slightly transgressive erotica, but with stronger writing and fewer pages of contractual detail (the pages and pages of 'lawyering up' the partnership in Fifty Shades is distracting, to say the least!).
Little Birds is Anas Nin's second book of erotica and continues to reveal, as a series of short stories, her explorations of sexual eccentricities, fetishes and seemingly singular desires. If you are a fan of Fifty Shades of Grey because it introduced you to, or was the most frank portrayal of, unusual erotic practices - then this book may well be the one-step-beyond you seek.
The book starts with a brief intro from the author that functions as a kind of disclaimer, or explanation of the work - revealing the conflict between the writer and this genre text, she states, "It is one thing to include eroticism in a novel or a story and quite another to focus one's whole attention on it" and goes on to say that "focusing wholly on the sexual life is not natural". Nin describes the act of writing about sexual pleasure as itself a transgressive act, one that both informs, and is informed by the content of the work. She, and other writers she worked with, wrote these stories for one reason: money.
It is in this decision to stray from inspiration of the muse to inspiration of the empty stomach that Nin finds news ways of writing and approaching that which all writers carry out: they write about what people do and think. It's when you start to specify that the details that you segregate the tourists from the aficionados. She's writing desperately, of desperate encounters.
In Little Birds you'll find stories that venture from voyeurs to raconteurs, from corrupted innocents to the pleasures of seasoned professionals. Each story is a vignette, so if it's character development you're looking for, look to novels instead. These are meant to be fleeting glimpses into other people lives and minds, furtive glances, short encounters. Fifty Shades of Grey is a fun book, but if it left you wanting less of the search for love, and more of the search for the carnal, then there are other books and other writers in the pantheon of erotic literature. We can think of Fifty Shades, in this vein, as the gateway book.
Little Birds by Anas Nin can be found at the Prince George Public Library.
-- Andrea Palmer is the Communications Coordinator at the library and will no longer be writing on this topic for fear of prurient stereotyping.
