Black Clock #5

Black Clock #17

by Steve Erickson

Charting the crossroads of obsession and the back alleys of eroticism, Black Clock 17 is a topography of forbidden passions--the terrors that lurk beneath what we desire, the attractions that lure us to what we dread--as mapped by authors including Henry Bean, Cecil Castellucci, Scott Bradfield and many others. The afterglow of an afternoon affair leaves a woman to satisfy a more illicit yearning in Dana Spiotta's "Watch," a group of teen orgiasts converge in Tom McCarthy's "Pyramid Party" to recreate the sexual humiliations of Abu Ghraib, and in Aimee Bender's "Vigilante" a young female police captain intrudes on the psychodramas of strangers to enforce the laws of the heart.

Paperback

First published August 29, 2013

About the author

Steve Erickson is the author of ten novels: Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Arc d'X, Amnesiascope, The Sea Came in at Midnight, Our Ecstatic Days, Zeroville, These Dreams of You and Shadowbahn. He also has written two books about American politics and popular culture, Leap Year and American Nomad. Numerous editions have been published in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Russian and Japanese. Over the years he has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Conjunctions, Salon, the L.A. Weekly, the New York Times Magazine and other publications and journals, and his work has been widely anthologized. For twelve years he was editor and co-founder of the national literary journal Black Clock, and currently he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside. He has received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and twice has been nominated for the National Magazine Award for criticism and commentary.

Reviews

[J.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wealth of goodness here, all tinged or saturated (depending on the page) with eroticism. The art and layout are perfectly obsessive and intrusive too. A ballsy new issue.