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After Hours: A Collection of Erotic Writing by Black Men
After Hours brings together an extraordinary collection of eighteen stories by today's best and brightest black writers-Colin Channer, (Waiting in Vain), John A. Williams (The Man Who Cried I Am) and National Book Award Winner Charles Johnson (Middle Passage), among others. From Mexico to the Hawaiian Islands, Jamaica to New Orleans, these erotically charged tales of love and lust explore the diversity and richness of African-American sexuality.
Together, these powerfully seductive stories of desire make up a sensual collection that will appeal to anyone who loves provocative prose and black literature at its best.
Charles Johnson
Colin Channer
Cole Riley
Brian Peterson
Kalamu Ya Salaam
Tracy Grant
Earl Sewell
John A. Williams
Kenji Jasper
Eric E. Pete
Alexs D. Pate
Brian Egleston
Clarence Major
Curtis Bunn
Gary Phillips
Brandon Massey
Robert Scott Adams
Jervey Tervalon
Arthur Flowers
Together, these powerfully seductive stories of desire make up a sensual collection that will appeal to anyone who loves provocative prose and black literature at its best.
Charles Johnson
Colin Channer
Cole Riley
Brian Peterson
Kalamu Ya Salaam
Tracy Grant
Earl Sewell
John A. Williams
Kenji Jasper
Eric E. Pete
Alexs D. Pate
Brian Egleston
Clarence Major
Curtis Bunn
Gary Phillips
Brandon Massey
Robert Scott Adams
Jervey Tervalon
Arthur Flowers
- GenresSexuality
256 pages, Paperback
First published July 30, 2002
2 people are currently reading
100 people want to read
About the author
Robert Fleming
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There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 13, 2019
In his introduction to After Hours, editor Robert Fleming promises the reader will have their perception of black male sexuality challenged by the stories he collected for this anthology. In the breadth of material and in the variety of voices showcased here, I think he has succeeded. The book features nineteen stories—all peers in quality and imagination. It offers fully crafted tales—not simple "stroke" put forth for the one-handed reader. In his introduction Fleming attempts to draw a line between "porn" and "erotica" and places his choices in the realm of the latter.
If the book plays it safely "middle of the road" with subject matter and sexual orientation, the writing—the wordcraft—is luminous, literate and shy of popular hip-hype. Fleming steers clear of deep street flavor in favor of carefully crafted stories of ordinary experience. I think it's brilliant within the bounds drawn here.
Fleming's choices eschew the popular stereotypes of heterosexual black men as sexual beings—stereotypes that have been around for the better part of the last century, or longer and of which all of us—white and black—are well aware.
The stories are by turns subtle, funny, searingly explicit, emotionally charged. That's the challenge of which Fleming spoke—in the desire—in the revelations these stories bring to the question of what goes on in the hearts and minds of men of colour caught in the throes of passion, of lust, of carnal love. That's the big deal. And it's done well—very, very well.
In National Book award winner Charles R. Johnson's funny and surprisingly chaste fable, Cultural Relativity, a young woman finds out why the young African man she desires won't kiss her. I laughed out loud because I could relate. Years ago I was in a relationship with a West African man who would do virtually anything sexual—but he wouldn't kiss. I never figured it out and he would never explain. I'm glad I didn't press my luck.
In the sad, poetic, Creole-spiced Once Upon a Time, by Arthur Flowers, (from Rest for the Weary), an illicit affair between a married woman and a bewitching conjurer of dreams runs aground. As the tables gently turn, she finds her power to walk away and leave him to make sense of it all. The story is erotic in content and in its sinuous use of language—the closest to "ethnic" that there is in the book—and it works well. It's a beautiful conjuring.
The closing story, Colin Channer's Revolution, is a bittersweet tale of lust remembered and lust observed by an aging patriarch in an unnamed Caribbean locale. With its barely concealed references to real persons, it reads like a third-person memoire. A young woman mysteriously arrives in the old man's hotel room and reveals that she has come in pursuit of a man who "doesn't want" her. The man is a popular Caribbean musician: a singer whose "...hair was an explosion, and his voice was keen in pitch and edged with danger, like a file against the blade of a machete." The old man dreams of revolution - the overthrow of his stepson as chief minister of the land, the taking of youth and beauty, the haunting by his late wife toppled by his unfulfilled desire for the beautiful interloper. It's a true work of art.
Because the stories are overwhelmingly heterosexual and "vanilla" there's a lot of space left out there to explore other aspects of the black male sexuality—such as the thoughts and experiences of kinky, gay and transgendered brothers. Perhaps a follow-up collection would address those absent voices.
In After Hours, there is passion and pain, discomfort and joy, the sight and smell of sex, the textures, the tastes, the trappings, the longings and disappointments we all can relate to. This not blaxploitation "lit", this is the real thing—true, sexy and all of it smart. It's fabulous.
If the book plays it safely "middle of the road" with subject matter and sexual orientation, the writing—the wordcraft—is luminous, literate and shy of popular hip-hype. Fleming steers clear of deep street flavor in favor of carefully crafted stories of ordinary experience. I think it's brilliant within the bounds drawn here.
Fleming's choices eschew the popular stereotypes of heterosexual black men as sexual beings—stereotypes that have been around for the better part of the last century, or longer and of which all of us—white and black—are well aware.
The stories are by turns subtle, funny, searingly explicit, emotionally charged. That's the challenge of which Fleming spoke—in the desire—in the revelations these stories bring to the question of what goes on in the hearts and minds of men of colour caught in the throes of passion, of lust, of carnal love. That's the big deal. And it's done well—very, very well.
In National Book award winner Charles R. Johnson's funny and surprisingly chaste fable, Cultural Relativity, a young woman finds out why the young African man she desires won't kiss her. I laughed out loud because I could relate. Years ago I was in a relationship with a West African man who would do virtually anything sexual—but he wouldn't kiss. I never figured it out and he would never explain. I'm glad I didn't press my luck.
In the sad, poetic, Creole-spiced Once Upon a Time, by Arthur Flowers, (from Rest for the Weary), an illicit affair between a married woman and a bewitching conjurer of dreams runs aground. As the tables gently turn, she finds her power to walk away and leave him to make sense of it all. The story is erotic in content and in its sinuous use of language—the closest to "ethnic" that there is in the book—and it works well. It's a beautiful conjuring.
The closing story, Colin Channer's Revolution, is a bittersweet tale of lust remembered and lust observed by an aging patriarch in an unnamed Caribbean locale. With its barely concealed references to real persons, it reads like a third-person memoire. A young woman mysteriously arrives in the old man's hotel room and reveals that she has come in pursuit of a man who "doesn't want" her. The man is a popular Caribbean musician: a singer whose "...hair was an explosion, and his voice was keen in pitch and edged with danger, like a file against the blade of a machete." The old man dreams of revolution - the overthrow of his stepson as chief minister of the land, the taking of youth and beauty, the haunting by his late wife toppled by his unfulfilled desire for the beautiful interloper. It's a true work of art.
Because the stories are overwhelmingly heterosexual and "vanilla" there's a lot of space left out there to explore other aspects of the black male sexuality—such as the thoughts and experiences of kinky, gay and transgendered brothers. Perhaps a follow-up collection would address those absent voices.
In After Hours, there is passion and pain, discomfort and joy, the sight and smell of sex, the textures, the tastes, the trappings, the longings and disappointments we all can relate to. This not blaxploitation "lit", this is the real thing—true, sexy and all of it smart. It's fabulous.
Displaying 1 of 1 review