What Is Kink?
A new collection of stories edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell explores the line between good taste and desire fulfilled.
LUCA SOLA/AFP/Getty Images
Kink is a new collection of short fiction edited by the novelists R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, including contributions from both. It’s a tasting menu of real variety, with flogged bottoms and lust-drunk tops mingling with vanilla straights nervously trying out their first slap.
The title is the theme: kinky sex. Roxane Gay’s story “Reach” is a delicate recipe for domination, for example, its narrator lingering over details like chopping onions before fucking her partner “over the kitchen counter so that she can taste their bite and cry without cause.” In Zeyn Joukhadar’s “Voyeurs,” a neighbor spies on a suburban queer couple having sex, transforming himself into the freak, despite claiming to find them disgusting and abnormal.