After Marco Vassi, the brilliant erotic writer and a dear personal friend, lost his struggle with HIV I paid tribute to him in an essay, An Intrepid Voyager to a World of Searing Erotic Fantasies. And I vowed to reissue his books  when I launched our E-Reads program. We have fulfilled that promise with release of ten of his works.  The latest is The Erotic Comedies .

The Erotic Comedies is a collection of fables and memoirs by America’s foremost erotic writer does for our era what Boccaccio, Swift, and Balzac did for theirs – exposes the human animal in all its absurdity. Vassi takes erotic writing to its extremes and then further, unraveling the seams of our most secret fantasies. His subjects are radical lesbians, male supremacists, transsexuals, establishment normals, therapists, revolutionaries, gynecologists, gurus and even God – created in Vassi’s own image, of course – all of whom are reduced to the ridiculous in a shower of bawdy laughter.

Capturing the sizzling vitality of the erotic upheaval of his age while also grasping its peculiar pretensions, he creates a gallery of unforgettable characters who are only ourselves become somehow larger than life. As with other great humorists, Vassi has a serious purpose: to explode the prevailing myths so the reader is forced to respond to his or her eroticism with unprogrammed intelligence. When everything from monogamy to coprophilia is presented from the perspective of the cosmic horse-laugh, no one can avoid finding his or her own role in the human comedy.

Richard Curtis