Every year, somebody has to read hundreds of erotic stories and pick the best ones. It sounds like a dream job, and it’s harder than it looks. For Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year, Volume 3, that somebody was Sacchi Green.
Cleis Press published the volume in 2018. It’s part of a long-running tradition. The original Best Lesbian Erotica series began in the 1990s and ran for nearly two decades, and the series was later relaunched as Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year. The publisher calls it the leading example of erotic lesbian fiction, which is the kind of thing publishers say, but in this case there’s a long track record behind the claim.
The annual anthology is a special kind of book. It isn’t one writer’s vision. It’s a snapshot of what lesbian erotica looks like in a given year, which voices are emerging, which themes keep coming up and how the genre is changing. If you read volumes from different years side by side, you can practically watch lesbian culture shift.
That puts a lot of weight on the editor. Green is an award-winning anthologist who has edited many collections of erotica over the years, and she has a reputation for strong, varied, well-crafted stories. The /books entry notes this volume leans toward stories that are sometimes unconventional or kinky, focusing on pleasure and heightened desire. The publisher describes the collection as sensual, inventive and striking.
It was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for erotica, and the bibliography rates it Good.
For writers, anthologies like this are worth studying. A short erotic story has very little room. It has to establish character, build tension, deliver heat and land an ending in just a few thousand words, and the best ones still feel like full stories rather than scenes. If you write romance or erotica yourself, reading a collection like this is a quick education in what works.
For readers, the appeal is simpler. Short stories fit into a busy life. You can read one before bed, and if a particular story isn’t your thing, there’s another one a few pages later. Anthologies also let you discover writers you’d never have found on your own and follow them to their longer work.
This is for readers who like their erotica varied, for writers studying short-form heat, and for anyone curious about where lesbian erotica stood in 2018. For a different flavour from the same publisher, Girls Who Score is also in the bibliography, as is Felice Newman’s The Whole Lesbian Sex Book for the non-fiction side.
The floor is yours. Do you prefer erotic short stories or full-length novels? Have you discovered a favourite author through an anthology? And editors and writers, what do you think makes a short erotic story really work?
Publication details are on the Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year, Volume 3 entry in the Lesbian Bibliography.