Works and Other Smoky George Stories Author:Perry Brass Works and Other Smoky George Stories is a collection of gay short stories that reads like a novel with many different episodes. What ties it all together is the voice of "Smoky George," the narrator. Smoky is sexually adventurous but socially shy. He is the sort who doesn't kiss and tell, but if prodded enough will tell. In these stories he does... more » tell. Many of the stories take place in unusual settings, such as a hunting camp in the Adirondacks, a steamer in the Pacific, the bayous of Louisiana, a farm in Ohio and the more usual settings of Manhattan and New Orleans' steamy, sensual French Quarter. What makes "Works and Other Smoky George Stories" different from other books of gay short stories is that one) they are often outrageously funny as well as outrageously sexy; and two) they combine all the classic elements of men's stories-tension, plot, character, and Indiana-Jones-type adventures, with a dose of old-fashioned class and a whamo-dollop of sex. What Brass wanted to do when writing the Smoky tales was to get gay stories out of what he called the "ghetto of confessional writing," in other words, stories about sad young men who have problems with their mothers, and write the kind of rip-roaring, action adventures he loved as a kid; with a lot of gay-positive, sex-positive attitudes in them as well. So the models for these stories were for the most part "classic stories." As he put it, if Somerset Maugham had written modern gay stories, he would have written these stories, and some editors have compared the narrator who goes by the name "Smoky George" to Maugham himself. In this expanded edition of Works, the author, who for years was better known as a poet, has also included a selection of his steamy, always controversial poetry, and an essay called " "Maybe We Should Keep the 'Porn' in Pornography."« less