One of our favorite erotica books is Afternoon Delight, edited by Alison Tyler, so when we noticed that Naughty Stories From A to Z was edited by the same person we had high hopes for it. And then when we noticed the little teaser tag on the front of this book's cover that reads "Banned in Texas!" we were really expecting some serious cover-to-cover orgasmic erotica. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as great as we expected.

Naughty Stories From A to Z is exactly what the name implies; 26 erotica stories titled so that there is one for each letter of the alphabet. They're short, ranging from 3 to 11 pages, so it doesn't take much time to read one or several. Most of them are written from a female first-person point of view, but since each one is written by a different author with no common theme there's a nice variety when it comes to scenarios and sex acts. There 's public sex, an extreme shoe fetish, a threesome, a semi-foursome, spanking, dirty talk, vaginal sex, anal sex, oral sex, exhibitionism, pegging, and loads of girl-on-girl. Enough that we would suggest that if you don't enjoy reading girl/girl stories, you should select a different book.

That all might sound like a recipe for one helluva good read, and in some instances it was, but there were a lot of stories that wound up being a turn-off for one or the other of us or simply weren't very exciting.
Blue Denim Pussy by Mistress A. was a good example of the latter. It's about a couple playing in a store's dressing room, but the idea (which wasn't even very original) was far more arousing than the story. In fact, none of the stories were any racier than what you find in most adult books and, in spite of the note on the cover, rest assured that this book was not really banned in the entire state of Texas. There's a page in the back that gives details on that.

Some of the stories started out promising but then were a let down in the end. Dirty Pictures by Beau Morgan was erotic enough that we expected the story to have a really hot climax, but it didn't. The author did a good job of creating an arousing visual of the shy girl being coaxed through her nude photo shoot, but it ended very abruptly with nothing more than a final thought from the photographer that we both thought was a little creepy.

Killing the Marabou Slippers by Molly Laster was probably the most unusual story in the whole lot, and it *was* pretty original. Between the woman's internal dialogue and the man getting it on with her shoes, it was so damned funny that we both agreed that we enjoyed reading it. Neither of us found it arousing at all, but it was funny.

On the positive side of the coin there were several tales that we really did enjoy as "naughty" stories should be enjoyed. Our individual opinions about which ones were good were more contradictory than what's usual when we're reviewing, but here are a few of the ones that we both enjoyed equally:

Pinch the Head by Julia Moore was our absolute favorite, and is based on a woman trying to figure out a couple of bawdy sayings that she's seeing on T-shirts while attending a convention in New Orleans. She meets a man whose explanations include a rather juicy public sex scene on the catwalk above the convention that we wouldn't mind trying ourselves.

Nobody's Business by Craig T. Vaughn is a man's account of his anal sex fetish that includes not only a hot re-telling of some of the women he's enjoyed taking, but also one about losing his own anal cherry to a gal who liked to peg. This is one of those stories that make you wonder why there aren't more male authors represented in adult anthologies.

Appraising Love by Dante Davidson involved some word play that had us wondering from time to time if it was the woman or the antique table that the appraiser was lusting over, and in the end you could probably say he wound up polishing both. It was rather mild as far as sex goes, but the author handled the story very well.

Overall it was a good book, and if it had been our first foray into the world of adult reading then maybe more of them would have "wowed" us. Some of the ones that didn't work for us weren't really unappealing, but they covered well-worn fantasies that are common to the genre and were not written in a way that made them stand out.

Alan says:
When I'm trying to rate an anthology book one of the things I think about is how many of the stories I enjoyed compared to how many there were overall. For this book my total came to about 11, but you can subtract Curtain Call by Thomas Roche because we'd already read that in the book called Caught Looking: Erotic Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionists. That means less than half of the book appealed to me, and there were not many that I would call "great" so I can't see giving it more than a 3-star rating.

Michele says:
Oddly enough, even though these stories are all written by different authors there was something about the cadence of the majority of them that made their "voice" seem very similar. It wasn't bad, but it somehow made the reading feel repetitive at times. There was also a tendency toward too much description when it came to the characters. I like to let my imagination play when we're reading erotica, so if an author spends too much time describing every item the person is wearing and what color it is and how their hair was styled and what color of makeup they had on, they start losing my attention. Especially if character is described in enough detail that I have a solid mental picture of them and they aren't my type. There were several stories that I did like very much, but the book just left me feeling neutral when I started to sum it all up for review.
I think that for the right reader this book may be more thrilling than it was for me, but I just wasn't that reader.