Sex in the City--London

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The story is set in Primrose Hill, where I’d spent considerable time in the late 90’s. First of all I had a boyfriend who worked in the film industry who lived there (no resemblance at all to Gary) and then a wonderful female friend written about in the story The Girl Who Was Sleek. For me, a working-class girl from the other side of the sticks in Walthamstow, Primrose Hill seemed to represent everything that could be good about London, as well as everything I was not.

  The nicest thing about the collaboration was the lengthy telephone calls Kevin and I had discussing every minutiae of the characters’ actions. The story went through at least twelve drafts. Kevin is good at shaping the plot with minimalist strokes, I am a sucker for detail, so together we write quite differently. Our second collaboration was the horror/erotic story Underneath set in the London Underground.

  Author Biographies

  Matt Thorne was born in Bristol in 1974 and educated at Cambridge and the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of six novels, Tourist(1998), Eight Minutes Idle(winner of an Encore Award, 1999), Dreaming of Strangers(2000), Pictures of You(2001), Child Star(2003) and Cherry(long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2004), as well as a sequence of novels for young adults, 39 Castles(2004-05). He also co-edited the anthologies All Hail The New Puritans (2000) and Croatian Nights(2005). His short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies including Piece of Flesh, edited by Zadie Smith (2000); New Writing Vol. 6 (1997), edited by A.S. Byatt and Vol. 13 (2003), edited by Toby Litt and Ali Smith), and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volumes 1, 2 & 7. He has also published stories in The Times and the Independent on Sunday. He also contributed to Maxim Jakubowski’s jointly-written novel, American Casanova(2006). He is a regular reviewer for several major newspapers and appears as a critic on radio and television and is currently working on a critical study of the pop star Prince to be published by Faber in 2011.

  Justine Elyot has been active on the erotica scene for a little over a year, but in that short time has managed to cram herself into more than ten anthologies and produce her own short story collection, On Demand, published by Black Lace. She can be found in books from Cleis Press, Xcite and Black Lace and delights in writing material that pushes boundaries and expectations.

  An erotica fan from an impressionable age, after finding Fanny Hill lurking unexpectedly between John Bunyan and Wilkie Collins on her parents’ bookshelves, Justine has an active and insatiable curiosity about most forms and expressions of human sexuality, and is happiest writing about the dynamics involved in domination and submission.

  Her second full-length work, The Business of Pleasure, will be published by Xcite in autumn 2010.

  Francis Ann Kerr is the childhood pseudonym for a writer who needs to keep her identity under wraps. She believes that writing about bad sexual experiences is just as essential as detailing life-affirming ones and hopes to see an end to orgasm plot-driven erotica sometime soon.

  Valerie Grey has published a few novels: Rocket Girl(Blue Moon), Aimee and Chloe and How She Lost Her Cherry (Olympia Press) and Bad Wife(Ophelia Press). She has two novels forthcoming from Kensington. She has published stories in the anthologies The Mammoth Book of Women’s Fantasies, Short and Sweet, and the journal Fiction International.She lives in Sedona, Arizona, where she works as a psychic reader and a bartender.

  NJ Streitberger is the pseudonym of critic and journalist Neil Norman. He began writing erotic fiction with a twist just over a year ago when he fell into bad company and is now a regular contributor to The Erotic Review. For seventeen years he was employed by the Evening Standard as a film critic and feature writer and returned to the freelance life just before the Russian take-over. One of his wilder ambitions is to become the Edgar Allan Poe of erotic fiction. In addition to stories and journalism he has written five plays, three screenplays, two novels, several film books and biographies and made a short movie. He used to write poetry but has refused to show it to anyone even under torture. He is currently the Dance Critic of the Daily Express and occasionally contributes to the Observer Food Monthly as it guarantees a free lunch. He is also a regular contributor to the Press TV programme Cinepolitics which discusses political movies and documentaries of every hue, religion and creed. His literary heroes are Poe, MR James, Wilkie Collins and Joseph Conrad. He is a Londoner by birth and metropolitan by the Grace of God.

  Kristina Lloyd is the author of three erotic novels, Darker Than Love, Asking for Trouble and Split, all published by Black Lace. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines both in the UK and US, and her novels have been translated into German, Dutch and Japanese. She is one of the co-founders of Erotica Cover Watch, a campaign to challenge the sexism in erotica publishing, and is a contributor to the Guardian Online, writing on feminism, porn and sexuality. She’s lived in London, Istanbul and Barcelona and has had travel pieces published in The Sunday Times.

  Kristina has a master’s distinction in Twentieth Century Literature, and has been described as ‘a fresh literary talent’ who ‘writes sex with a formidable force’. She lives in Brighton on the south coast of England. For more, visit http://kristinalloyd.wordpress.com

  Lily Harlem lives in beautiful rural Wales, juggling two musical teenagers, a workaholic husband and an ever-increasing menagerie of rescued pets ranging in size from fish to horses. Before starting her writing career two years ago Lily studied at Oxford University and then went on to become an Accident and Emergency nurse working just outside London.

  She now lives a much quieter life with a desk overlooking rolling hills and farmland and has shaken the dreaded manacles of shift work. Without a hospital gown in sight, except in a few naughty stories, her over-active imagination has been allowed to run wild and free and has literally burst from the seams.

  This year Lily received first place in the long story section of the LoveHoney Vulgari Award for Erotic Fiction with an American inspired tale entitled ‘Madam President’ – think seriously hot politicians up to high jinks in the Oval Office. She also has a spankingly naughty tale called ‘Stable Manners’ in Best Women’s Erotica 2010. On a daily basis Lily finds that writing for Xcite and for Total E-Bound keeps her fingertips out of trouble – most of the time.

  When looking for inspiration Lily often calls on the many characters she met in her past life as a nurse which means her stories are made up of a mixed bag of people with real bodies, flaws and insecurities. Plots travel on everyone’s favourite journey, falling in love and on route her characters explore their sexuality and sensuality in a safe, consensual way. With the bedroom door left wide open the reader can hang on for the ride and Lily hopes that by reading sensual romance people will be brave enough to try something new for themselves- after all life is too short to be anything other than fully satisfied.

  Maxim Jakubowski is a twice award-winning British writer, editor, critic, lecturer, ex-publisher and ex-bookshop owner. He shares his time between the wonderfully dubious shores of erotica and the perilous beaches of crime and mystery fiction. He is responsible for the Mammoth Book of Erotica series and the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime series, is editor of over 75 anthologies and counting, as well as being the author of two handfuls of novels and short story collections. He was crime reviewer for Time Out London and then the Guardian for nearly twenty years, and also makes regular appearances on radio and television. He also co-directs Crime Scene, London’s annual crime and mystery film and literature festival, and runs the MaXcrime imprint. I Was Waiting For You is his latest novel.

  Though based in London, he has been known to travel and frequent hotel rooms with depressing regularity, which no doubt inspired his London Noir, Paris Noir and Rome Noir collections, as well as the Sex in the City series. He has lived in, or regularly visited, every city featured in the Sex in the City titles published so far. When not writing or sighing at the sight of women, he collects books, CDs and DVDs with alarming haste.

  Originally from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Elizabeth Col
dwell has lived and worked in London for over twenty years. For much of that time, she was editor of Forum magazine, where she helped launch the careers of a number of well-known authors and was one of the co-founders of the Guild of Erotic Writers. She also wrote two novels for the long-defunct Headline Liaison imprint. She still contributes to Forum on a regular basis, while also concentrating on her own fiction, which has long been featured in anthologies published by Black Lace, Cleis Press, Circlet Press, Xcite Books and Ravenous Romance, as well as the MammothBest New Erotica series.

  Her other great passion apart from writing is Rotherham United and the men who play for the team. If you see the ‘London Millers’ flag at one of their games, you know she won’t be very far away …

  Clarice Clique lives in a small terraced house in England dreaming of all the lives she is not living. Some of these dreams make it into stories and some of these stories make it into print. In 2009 she had her first novel published, a BDSM, sub/dom story called Hot Summer Days, by Pink Flamingo Publications. She is currently working on her next three novels, simultaneously hoping that somehow she will finish one of them in the next few years. However, she is too easily distracted from her work by an internet addiction which means her brain is brimming over with ‘facts’ about obscure television stars gleaned from Wikipedia. She owns many different shades of thigh-high boots ordered from a surprising variety of internet shops; she can count to ten in ten different languages; she has a secret life as a tall blue woman complete with tail, hooves and horns in a certain online game, and she is having several simultaneous internet affairs, wondering if cybersex and a nice vibrator might not actually in fact be better than the real thing.

  Carrie Williams is the author of three novels for Black Lace – The Blue Guide, Chilli Heat, and The Apprentice, as well as countless short stories in Black Lace anthologies, some of them under the pseudonym Candy Wong. Her erotic fiction has also graced the pages of Scarlet magazine and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica.

  As an established travel journalist, Carrie visits and reviews some of the finest hotels, restaurants and shops around the world. Her adventures abroad inspire and inform her fiction, from street markets and temples in India to spas in the South of France, as do the many fascinating characters she meets on her travels.

  Carrie began writing erotica after becoming immersed in the work of Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille and the Surrealists while studying French literature at Oxford. She wrote her dissertation on the work of the female Surrealists, most notably the Argentine painter Léonor Fini, best known for her graphic illustrations for the Story of O.

  Carrie is usually on the road but can often be found in London, Manchester or Paris. When not writing fiction, she enjoys gardening, the theatre and cinema, vintage clothes shopping and spending time with her Russian blues.

  Marcelle Perks originally comes from Stourbridge, West Midlands. She spent her twenties in London and has lived in Hanover, North Germany since 2001. She is the author of the non-fiction books Incredible Orgasms (2005), A User’s Guide to the Rabbit (2006) and Secrets of Porn Star Sex (2007). Her erotic fiction has appeared in Sex Macabre, Three-Way, The A-Z of Naughty Spanking Stories, Dying for It, Ultimate Burlesque, Ultimate Decadence and The Mammoth Book of Best Erotica.

  An avid film fan, she has written for a range of publications, including Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and British Exploitation Cinema, The Goth Bible, The BFI Companion to Horror, British Horror Cinema, Cinema Macabre and the magazines Gay Times, Nerve, Fangoria, The Dark Side, Videoworld, Shivers, Flesh and Blood and Kamera.

  She appeared as a dominatrix in the film Molotov Samba(2005) and as a mud-smeared Satanist in Faust – Love of the Damned(2000). She did dialogue work on the award-winning Danish erotic film, All About Anna (2005).

  Although she has known Kevin Mullins for years, they only began to collaborate on writing projects after she moved to Germany.

  Kevin Mullins lives and works in the wastes of Slough. In the 90s he became associated with the miserabalist group of 90s horror fiction writers and had stories published in Darklands, Darklands 2, The Tiger Garden, Peeping Tom and Squane’s Journal. It’s fair to say that all of his fiction is edgy and he also wrote about the film Don’t Look Now for Cinema Macabre, a book of horror writers discussing their favourite horror films.

  Mullins is a bit of a connoisseur of girls like Ester. He regularly attends erotic events and clubs and knows London like the back of his hand. Although he has red hair himself, he doesn’t share Gary’s obsession.

  www.xcitebooks.com