Five-Minute Erotica by Carol Queen

Five-Minute Erotica Reviews

• 
  Jo (The Book Geek)

  Five-minute erotica, certainly lives up to the title. This saucy number consists of 35 short stories, and the average length of each, are about two or three pages. This makes for a convenient read, if you only have ten minutes for your lunch break!
  Due to the stories being so short, there is certainly no room for in depth character descriptions or world building. I found it rather refreshing to discover that every story wasn't just consisting of a detailed description of explicit sex. Some were based more around a persons particular desire, which could be interesting.
  As with every short story collection, there were more I favoured more than others. The stories that just went BANG, straight into hardcore sex, were very uninspiring, but others that had a little more story to them and background, I found to be better. This rather graphic book is certainly not for the shy.
  
• 
  Melissa

  Dear Marla, His Hands, A Closer Encounter, & The Real Reason I Have Long Hair are particularly good. Within is incredible!
  
  I truly feel sorry for the people who don't understand that great sex is 90% cerebral~
• 
  SHIP (formerly The CSPH)

  Composed of thirty-five short stories, at an average length of three pages each, the collection features twenty-seven contributing authors including M. Christian, Thomas Roche, Cecilia Tan, and Sage Vivant.
  
  In the introduction, Queen states that these stories were chosen for a female heterosexual audience. While the gender of the narrators changes throughout the pieces, the stories do remain largely heterosexual. The stories themselves are rather diverse; however, they do stay on the tame side of things. Topics covered by these stories include dressing up as a cat, fruit, power play, group settings, religion, flashing, spanking, and alien abduction. Thus, there are rather good odds of at least one story striking your fancy, though it will be over rather quickly and you’ll be on to another story.
  
  Given that the stories range in length from one to five pages, there isn’t much in terms of character description or development. The plots also tend to be on the predictable side due to space. Not every story includes explicit sex; there are also stories that are more focused on desire or seduction. On the other hand, the short length enables one to read a story during a quick break, or to read the entire anthology in a little over an hour.
  Unfortunately, there are quite a few typos and grammatical errors throughout the collection; though perhaps because of the subject matter, they do not significantly detract from the reading experience.
  
  I would recommend this collection as a light introduction to erotica for heterosexual individuals as it can be a useful tool in figuring out what erotica one finds exciting. However, I would not necessarily recommend this to someone who has established tastes in erotica, as the lack of character and plot developments may be a turn-off, though it may be fun to fantasize about what happens next.
• 
  Read2review

  With 50 Shades becoming a overnight hit our local Waterstones (book shop) put together a table of the books with an erotic element. I have to admit I was very intreagued and ended up purchasing four different books. This was one of them.
  
  Each story lives up to the “five minute” rule and were very easy to read. I liked some stories more than I liked others. Some left more to the imagination than others. On a whole the book was a really good read and there were no stories that left me feeling disappointed.
  
  I liked the variety that was offered by the books. From stories having only play to those that had full blown sex, and those that had both, each story was written well. There were no glaring errors. There was one story that I had to read parts of again as I wasn’t sure what the author meant but in a book of over 40 stories that’s pretty good going.
  
  For those just getting started with this genre this is a perfect book to start with. It gets the mind racing and I have to say its helped me with writing sex scenes, in the way that I can now put the words together a little easier.
  
  I give Five Minute Erotica 4/5.
• 
  Rosalía

  These stories can be read very quickly, in a rapid coffee break before working again for a stretch. Some stories in this collection are decent while others are just skeletons that really need to be elongated into a story that has 3000 words. I liked "Restaurant Opening," "Under the Camel Light," and "Subway." Most of the stories though,like rapid fire sex, were just uninspiring.
• 
  Lina

  Just what I was in the mood for. I've been having a hard time concentrating on a book recently, too much happening in RL, so this collections of short stories was just the bedtime reading I was after :-)
• 
  rapid apathy

  This book is basically everything you don't want to read in erotica. Or in anything. Ever.
• 
  T.C. Mill

  Even though I didn't adore every story in this anthology (a bit too wide a range and too many pieces for every one to hit my finicky buttons), I'm glad to have read all of them, from "Seduction," the opening number that's a bit of a prose poem and one ecstatic YES, to "The Suit," an incredibly sensual story of tailoring. And those two I DO adore.