Erotic Review

Erotic Review

Welcome

Exploring Desire

The Erotic Review was relaunched in Spring 2024 as a biannual art and literary journal that explores desire for a contemporary audience. Designed by Studio Frith and with a guest art curator for each issue, the biannual Erotic Review publishes essays, poetry and stories. Themes from the magazine are explored in a new series of literary salons in London from May 2025. Become an annual subscriber and receive two issues by post and an invitation to the erotic community. Monthly updates on the Erotic Review world, special discounts and early bird tickets to our London/Berlin launches and salons.

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Short

Ettore Garofolo

by Hugo Tepest

I think I have experienced ten to fifteen truly erotic moments in my life, by which I mean moments during which I felt a strong sexual charge that was both entirely plausible and entirely uncorroborated.

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Essay

Next Chapter Please: Shame, Desire & Fanfiction

by Emily Waddell

“I’m not going to die yet, and a strange guy with horns is determined to give me oral pleasure. It’s just that... out of all the worst-case scenarios I’ve come up with since being abducted by aliens, being licked until I come isn’t anywhere on the list.”

My unshaven legs dangle out of the fourth-floor window of my apartment in Berlin as I flick through the latest adventure in the Ice Planet Barbarians universe. The erotic sci-fi series with seven-foot blue males with horns, tails and cocks the size of baseball bats has become my life. Thirty books into the series, I have given up all pretence of reading the serious prose stacked on my nightstand. The set-up of each book is similar and comforting. There may be quirks and twists in the world-building but, at heart, a girl is abducted, meets a monstrous-but-handsome alien, hijinks ensue, and fucking abounds.

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Essay

When I Miss America, I look at r/Gooncaves

by Rebecca Rukeyser

When I miss America, when I miss the heady American cycle of extremity and shame— glutting and then repenting with such extremity the penitence is itself a kind of glutting, abstaining until the abstinence is as voluptuous as excess—I look at r/gooncaves.

A few definitions. Gooning refers to entering a state of trance-like, porn-fueled masturbation. It’s edging plus: the idea is to hold off orgasm essentially indefinitely and fall into a sort of a drooling state of ecstasy. Consuming a profound amount of porn is integral to this.

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Issue 4

The Autumn/Winter issue contains Max Porter’s five most erotic words and a ground-breaking story by Bregje Hofstede, translated from the Dutch by Booker prize winner Michele Hutchison, on desire postpartum. Further short stories by Pulitzer prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, sage o-a remembering a sex party and Brazilian author Ana Paula Pacheco, translated by Julia Sanches.

An essay considering romantic love in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Deep Throat by Paulita Pappel and an experience on Grindr by Oluwaseun Olayiwola. Further essays by Brittany Newell, Rebecca Birrell and Omar Kasmani. Shorts by Alex Quicho, Ryan Ruby and Ukrainian artist Misha Honcharenko. Poetry by Mary Katharine Tramontana, Benjamin Farrand and Julia Wong Kcomt, translated by Jennifer Shyue.

Guest art curator Clare Cumberlidge invites Irish artist Richard Malone to stage an intervention throughout the publication, with over 40 pages of their work across painting, sculpture, performance and installation.

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Fiction

Urubus

by Leïla Slimani trans. Sam Taylor

Irène can’t remember how it started — at what precise moment the joy began to leak out of her, like air from a punctured tyre. Did she glimpse her reflection in a shop window one gloomy afternoon? Did someone make a hurtful remark that slowly abraded her heart? Or did her melancholy have a purely physical cause: the diminishing flow of a certain secretion; some hormonal imbalance or neurological disorder?

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Essay

Wild Spring

by Geoffrey Mak

“Why don’t you come to Berlin with me?” I asked, and I still remember the look on your face. We were walking in Chinatown, past the park on Bayard Street where the Chinese men practice tai-chi on Saturday mornings. We had barely started seeing each other, it hadn’t been very long. But I wanted to gift you some easy joy—something grand, yet sweet as a Jolly Rancher—because you seemed so surprised by it all.

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