There’re a few stories in this collection that I never got to include in BAE before because they predated 1993. I hungered for them; I cursed my tether to our annual tradition. First among those yearned for was “Blue Light,” the novella by Steven Saylor, writing as Aaron Travis, which is perhaps the most fantastic supernatural erotic thriller ever written. Edgar Allan Poe would find a telltale cock pounding in this one. At first, I couldn’t go to sleep from reading it, and then I couldn’t rest until I published it! I’m so happy to finally have the story here.

The best erotic lit is always highest comedy and deepest tragedy—both in the cut, at times. I laughed at Eric Albert’s “The Letters” when I wasn’t moaning at his protagonist, “You’ve got to be stopped!”

Erotic prescience illuminates places and times that couldn’t be captured any other way—like New York on a high-wire down low in Nelson George’s “It’s Never Too Late in New York.”

And sometimes, you just need to laugh—a helpless, naked, wet belly laugh—at it all, like Joe Maynard’s “Fleshlight.”

The shaming prejudice about sex writing is that it’s supposed to be so porny, so stupid, so obvious that “anyone” could write it, craft unnecessary.

But how many people can perfect its satire and get you off at the same time, like Serena Moloch’s “Casting Couch”? How many chick-lit authors can turn a “Manicure” into a descent into the S/M looking glass, as Martha Garvey does? And who could articulate the dilemmas facing woman’s sexual choices like Susan St. Aubin in her “This Isn’t About Love”? Without their direct erotic approach, it wouldn’t have been said nearly as well.

I also have some memorable new stories in this collection, too. I’ll never say “Fuck me, Santa!” again without thinking of Steve Almond’s “A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve.” Haddayr Copley-Woods’s haunted house made me creep to my bed the night after I read it and felt the floors whispering to my soft feet. Jennifer D. Munro had me howling with size-queen irony in “Pinkie,” and Eloise Chagrin reinvented a cuckold’s tale in “Playing Doctor.”

Erotic literature is made to break taboos—that’s its promise. Rowan Elizabeth’s “Halves” transformed a Hansel and Gretel–style fairy tale into a way of seeing unbreakable desire. Author G. Bonhomme reconstructed the male libido in his “Program,” and Susannah Indigo throws every Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous rule out the car window in her “Year of Fucking Badly.”