... a tasting menu of real variety, with flogged bottoms and lust-drunk tops mingling with vanilla straights nervously trying out their first slap ... There’s delight in Kink’s sensory abundance, the same way a buffet delights more than a menu. The more you read, however, the less the stories have in common...Kink is the absence of the normal, not the presence of something concrete ... That it’s easier to refer to a story about the concept than it is to define it outright bespeaks the maddening difficulty of representing sex in words accurately, let alone elegantly. This conundrum also lays bare our heavy reliance on fiction to describe and taxonomize what sex means for the human experience ... Such is the occasional corniness of Kink, which is not a literary problem so much as a feature of almost all writing about sex. That’s partly because satisfying real-life sex requires that we get vulnerable and un-self-consciously sincere about our needs, which is a way of communicating quite foreign to the cool and intelligent distance of the professional observer (the curator, the novelist, the critic). Making things worse, we prize originality in our language arts, while sex has remained much the same across the centuries, making cliché almost an inevitability in any sex scene committed to paper ... Not every story in Kink is a happy one, nor is every one particularly erotic. But each is a portrait of the way sex can turn slippages and differentials in human society—between people trying to understand one another through language, between the strata of power hierarchies, between differing gender expressions—into a phenomenon only fiction can really get at. Kwon and Greenwell’s Kink is an excuse to dwell in this confusion of ideas and juicy social problems, and an invitation to enjoy the sheer inexplicable fact that the body speaks a language we can’t understand.

[A] titillating collection of stories about sex, fetish, love, and loneliness from a diverse group of literary authors. Although the collection includes detailed descriptions of sex acts, Kink is primarily an exploration of intimacy, power, and our human need to share an emotional bond ... Little is left to the imagination with respect to explicit and diverse sex, and the collection benefits from the variety of voices offering a wide spectrum of narratives. Cis-gendered, hetero-normative sex is a minority in this collection; rather there is an intimate look into an array of matches, which at times stimulate more than just the mind ... The collection as a whole benefits from familiarity and intimacy. Many of the stories read like memoir, a testament to the adroit control of authorial voice ... They have recruited an all-star lineup of notable contributors who deliver stories that are fun to read while thoughtful about relationships, power, gender, and expectations.

... the tales sit at various intersections of smolder and technical accomplishment. Many do exert an indirectness or subtlety that bends the straight line from longing to gratification. Of these entries, some are arresting—the characters precise, the language invitingly lush—and some are inert. Several contributions evoke erotica, and a few manage to be both sexy and illuminating, although too much thoughtful interrogation can diminish the sex, like explaining a joke. What becomes clear is that a perhaps irreconcilable tension exists between a good story about kink and a good story about what kink means ... Stories that cut, as many of Kink ’s do, in the other direction—toward metaphor, subtext, an interior world—conform to our idea of good fiction, but they also seem to waste an opportunity to explore kink as an aesthetic ... the book doesn’t offer precise definitions of its subject, and so its aesthetics are also imprecise, defaulting often to a diligent seriousness. Mainly, the book bestows visibility: on unconventional desires, on the authors who depict them ... You might secretly wait and hope for the acknowledgment of your own proclivity—who wouldn’t—but it’s also pretty clear that part of the book’s allure flows from what could (charitably) be called curiosity, or (uncharitably) voyeurism. This isn’t unique to Kink, of course. On some level, to read anything is to press your face to the keyhole of other people’s fantasies ... I would be remiss if I did not mention that several of the stories in Kink are abysmally bad. You can pursue the causes, consequences, and metaphors of B.D.S.M. so studiously that the acts themselves become domesticated. (Also, several entries are rife with cliché—and not the liberating kind.) It’s curious that the collection declares its subject to be kink, not sex; doing so embeds the gathered work in a firmament of norms and identities rather than one of hungers, sensations. But maybe this is by design; as the reader’s mind tracks back and forth between bodies and definitions, she begins to see those definitions’ flimsiness, and to wonder about the unexpressed depths that live in each of us. Cultural judgments are never fixed, and the imprecision of the word “kink” in some ways echoes the imprecision of the word 'literature,' which depends on a superfluity of truth or beauty that is impossible to pin down. In that way, at least, art is exactly like smut: you know it when you see it.

A tweet that’s haunted me (and there are many) is one that reads, 'Most of sex is committing to the bit' ... I thought of that tweet often while reading Kink ... At times reading Kink felt like having a mirror turned on me. In my reading, I kept thinking: 'What is kink, anyway? Do I participate?' I put down the book, texted friends, revisited memories. Ultimately, this seems to be the collection’s point: to prompt a revisitation of the transgressive, a consideration, or insertion, of the self ... Some stories, like handcuffs, are sturdier than others. Many are flimsy and ineffective, relying too much on an obvious exchange of power, or keeping the concept of kink on too short a leash. Other people’s dreams are rarely interesting to hear; the same holds true for listening to other people’s kinks, at least in this collection ... Still, stories by Roxane Gay and Brandon Taylor each stayed with me after reading.

For any connoisseur of BDSM—which can include erotic bondage, discipline, submission and other forms of sexual role playing—or person who favors non-traditional sex, such depictions of kink are not only too contrived, milquetoast or emotionally barren, they’re also incredibly shortsighted.That’s where Kink comes in. This provocative, scintillating collection of literary fiction edited by R.O. Kwon (The Incendiaries) and Garth Greenwell (Cleanness) gives kinky sex its due ... As with any anthology, not all of the offerings hit their mark. Some, at least from this reader’s perspective, go long on physical descriptions (Spanking! Strangling! Golden showers!) but focus less on the emotional nuances of the encounter or stop short of investigating more complex questions ... Consequently, they feel shocking for shocking’s sake or overly clinical and bland, depending on your perspective ... Kink presents a real potential shift for intimacy.

The kink...is pretty one-note. There’s a lot of BDSM, most of it light ... Unlike so many entries in the history of erotic writing, these tales are hardly ever larger-than-life, never seeming to embody kink from the inside, so much as they depict it from the outside ... Perhaps expectedly, the collection’s charms are entirely bound up in the MFA-vetted, sometimes hugely impressive technical skill of the contributors ... Yet for all of Kink’s compositional thrills, it runs into a stumbling block of realism, and particularly the realist sex scene: language’s inadequacy. Kink brims with characters describing their inability to describe arousal ... Kink refuses to lead its readers into...risky, rewarding, and complicated terrain ... The editors fail to recognize that provocation and intention can coexist in even the most radical work without the latter making its presence known ... Kink isn’t really about playing. It’s about being 'literary,' a marketing term used by publishers that the book’s editors have conflated with the word 'artistic' ... What Kink is doing is denouncing 'low-class' culture ... Kwon and Greenwell are merely acting like redevelopers serving a complicated, corrosive, and familiar system of governance. They do not own erotic art, and if they want to move into its neighborhood, they would do well to act like neighbors, not gentrifiers ... literary fiction is their kink. It’s not ours, not everyone’s.

The anthology of short fiction edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell breathes in BDSM, kink, desire and sex, and exhales delicate paragraphs and breathtaking prose from renowned writers like Roxane Gay, Callum Angus and Kim Fu. What Kink does, almost imperceptibly, is cover all the bases of sexuality ... Kink proves there’s beauty in libidinous words, that there’s more to the genre than porn without plot, and that for every shade of kink there’s an underbelly of light and darkness. Kwon and Greenwell have created a masterpiece of conscientious, compassionate writing that should be treasured.

... less a collection of stories than a journey through the spectra of human sexuality and erotica. The book isn’t intended to titillate readers so much as it is to keep them company, to reassure them that someone somewhere has been their exact flavor of freak. While most erotica seeks to plunge the reader into a kind of fantasy that’s rarely attainable, Kink trucks in what’s real ... The collection is distinguished by its accessibility: from the bondage expert to the innocently curious, there’s something in Kink for everyone.

Intimate and wide ranging in every sense, the script-flipping, heart-skipping stories gathered here speak to and across one another, conveying truths of desire, experience, and selfhood as only literature can.