Larger	In the Box Called Pleasure: Stories Author: Kim Addonizio
	Book Information Publisher: Fiction Collective Two Book Type: Paperback Members Wishing: 0 Rating: ? ISBN-13: 9781573660815 - ISBN-10: 1573660817 Publication Date: 10/25/1999 Pages: 150

In the Box Called Pleasure is the first collection of short-fiction by prize-winning poet, Kim Addonizio. These gutsy and post-feminist stories will elicit the shock of recognition from readers, especially women, and may reveal to men something about the dark edges of a woman's psyche. By turns graphic and funny, these urban tales present characters who are teetering on the edge. Indifferent or absent lovers, too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, obsession, paranoia, a desire that is always fresh in spite of the facts-this is the macabre landscape of these very unusual and unrestrained works. In "Reading Sontag," Addonizio invades and recasts Susan Sontag's essay "The Pornographic Imagination" while describing a monumentally failed relationship. In "The Gift," a woman finds a dildo on the street and is magically transformed into a man. From the looming darkness of "The Fall of Saigon" to the meticulously realized phantasmagoria of "A Brief History of Condoms," Addonizio's imagination takes us where contemporary American writing rarely ventures. This book is the unique product of a poet with a gift for formal bravado, uncanny incident, and a strange but very human pathos. Her fictions prepare us for the real millennium.