The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

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Back in 1991 I approached Nick Robinson with a view to convince him to add a volume of erotica to the then fledgling but already successful Mammoth line. It took a couple of years of repeated insistence to overcome his initial resistance to the idea. If crime and mystery, science fiction and fantasy, thrillers, spy tales and horror were the obvious genres to include in the Mammoth list, I pleaded, why not erotica? A literary genre which was similarly looked down at by the establishment but had good commercial prospects and, I argued, a ready-made public and intrinsically had as much quality as other fields of popular writing, together with a prestigious heritage which had been in recent decades muddied by the more down-market and exploitative side of most publishers’ production.

Although he and his team were at first reluctant, they finally gave me the go ahead and The Mammoth Book of Erotica first appeared in 1994, with Carroll & Graf in the USA enthusiastically taking on the reins of the American edition. The book was a surprising success from the outset, going into several reprints and being taken up by a variety of book clubs. Having the field to myself, I was in the privileged situation of being able to select stories and extracts from some of my favourite contemporary writers who had not shied away from writing about sex in an explicit manner in their work. I included Clive Barker, Leonard Cohen, Anne Rice, Samuel R. Delany, Marco Vassi, Ramsey Campbell, Kathy Acker and many others. I wanted to validate my contention that erotica was not just sex scenes but could feature plot, solid characterization and emotions alongside the expected hydraulics.

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