Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

Introduction

Eroticism is on the march; or maybe it’s more apt to say, it’s on the slink.

Whatever the proper term, perhaps nowhere is that advance more evident than in Asia, which has by far the largest population of any continent. Asia practices eroticism in fascinating ways and, recently, Asian writers and writers based in Asia have been chronicling some of this eroticism.

In the second half of 2006, Monsoon Books (Singapore) published Best of Singapore Erotica, the first anthology of erotic fiction (along with a handful of erotic poems) ever released in Singapore. That volume proved to be a surprising success: not only did it dominate Monsoon’s own bestseller list for many months, but just four months after the collection first hit the bookstores, we were going into our second edition.

Strongly encouraged by the success of this venture, Monsoon decided a few years later to come out with a second collection of erotic short fiction.

This time, however, the company decided to cast its nets wider and brought out Best of Southeast Asian Erotica, in which four other countries were included. (The new territory included Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.) Although it only appeared in late 2010, this book, too, seems to be a success, both critically and commercially. Now we are taking our erotic sampling out into a new frontier: the world of ebooks.

The stories included in these first two e-collections represent a mix-and-match of the best works from the two earlier print volumes. We have dropped the flash fictions and poems from our Best of Singapore Erotica collection and then merged them in these first two volumes of ebooks with pieces from the Best of Southeast Asian collection.

As the first collection was composed entirely of Singapore stories, there is still a heavy presence of Singapore fiction in both of these first volumes.

Subsequent volumes feature first-rate erotic fiction (and some non-fiction) from throughout Asia.

But what we offer here is exemplary of the principles we employed throughout in selecting stories for the first two print collections: good stories, well-written, though with a definite erotic flavour. This is not pornography; it is a sub-genre of full-bodied literature which looks at and celebrates the sensual and the sexual in the human experience. These stories were not chosen simply because they titillate (though many of them do that as well), but because they delight, inform and sometimes even enlighten and ennoble.

We enjoyed putting both collections together (as you might well imagine). We think you will enjoy reading these stories and seeing why Asia is fast becoming the world centre of eroticism in all its richness and variety.