Piece of Flesh

by Zadie Smith (Editor)

Short stories by James Flint, author of Habitus, Daren King, author of Boxy an Star, Tohy Litt, author of Adventures of Capitalism, Beatniks and Corpsing, Rebecca Ray, author of A Certain Age, Matt Thorne, co-editor of All Hail and the New Puritans and author of Tourist, Eight Minutes Idle and Dreaming of Strangers.

Edited and with an introduction by Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth .

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection that suffers from the usual problems with literary erotica, namely that the authors are basically too embarrassed or unconfident to write something straightforwardly arousing, and instead distance themselves through various forms of satire or irony. The most successful contribution, and the only one that feels remotely real, is Matt Thorne's ‘Paying my Friends for Sex’, which – well, the title is its own plot summary, but at least it takes its set-up seriously and thinks through how things might actually play out.

By far the best thing in the book is Zadie Smith's smart, chatty introduction, where she expatiates resignedly on the pornification of modern life, and revels in the pleasure she took in being able to solicit smut from five of her friends: ‘it never occurred to me that lovely, sweet Rebecca [Ray] had sex with cab drivers or that serious Jim [James Flint] had a thing about Littlewoods catalogues. I will look upon them all in a slightly different light now. Any invitation I may have considered extending to them w/r/t meeting my mother are hereby revoked.’

Overall, though, the collection is slim and unsubstantial and, probably, a little too knowing for its own good.

[SB · Rating 2 out of 5]

i have never read a minibook before picking this book from library. i was genuinely interested for this book because of two reasons - 1. zadie smith has edited it, and 2. it's a pornographic book. never have i read that before, too. so, i was hopeful. i was wrong.

the introduction of this book by zadie smith as the editor was superb. it was humourous, witty, and subtle. in the introduction, she claimed that this a book of "pornographic nature". no, it is not. i see a lot of porn (it is kinda drug to me, i admit that) and i love those kinds of porn which gives me pleasure. so, this book is the retarded child of andrew blake's porn films and erika lust's "x confessions" (the plots of some of the films of erika lust are weirdly similar to the plots of some of this film). this book is not pornographic, but mildly erotic (except the first one). but, the stories fall flat, doesn't have enough strong material in it. except smith's introduction, i loved the last story -- "speedo". it was funny and it basically subverted the format of erotica/pornography. otherwise, reading this book was meh!

p.s. one writer wrote his story imitating dfw (and his love for footnotes) in this collection. pretty bad, bro, pretty bad attempt.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was alright -- the collection is more satire regarding sex than sexy. Some of the techniques employed were postmodern-ly self-aware, which is fine and interesting, but not necessarily titillating. I love Zadie Smith but I guess I went into with the wrong expectations. I did read the intro first, and maybe I overlooked some of the stated driving forces behind the selections.

[Dragana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Smith's intro was the best written part. Some of her oversexed buddies were more readable than others.

[Solomon Holmes · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very 2001 collection of short stories about sex. A couple of good stories here but none of them actually seem to say much, and besides that they aren't really sexy at all either so seems to fail on two levels.

The second to last story about the sexy over the top details of the Littlewoods calendar is genuinely quite good though and reminded me of a David Foster Wallace short story.