[A] fierce, fearless collection.” — More Magazine
“The women of this collection make the case that good sex is never exclusively about the act, but also about how you approach it.” — NPR
“Reading Sugar in My Bowl offers a rare opportunity to peer in on a breadth of intimate sexual experiences, a wide variety of motivations, and problems and desires you never knew existed-as well as the little thrill of stumbling upon a story that sounds like your own.” — Slate Double XX
“Abundant with affairs, marriages, motherhood and our sexual sense of mortality it is a thoughtful read, a perfect aperitif on a summer evening. The stories penetrate a secret space in our brains we so often neglect: our sense of sexuality.” — Forbes
“Jong has crafted candid accounts of love and passion from renowned female writers into a sensual and sensitive read.” — Interview
“[Sugar in My Bowl] runs the gamut from pornographic and hilarious to ironic and poignant. The result is a fun, quick, beach read, requiring as much or as little intellectual energy as the reader chooses to invest.” — Chicago Sun-Times
“You can take these women seriously, laugh, squirm, and put hand over mouth at their weird, exciting, uncomfortable, joyous tales of ardor, while still admiring the agility of their prose.” — The Daily
“Jong partners with 28 collaborators to create this fierce and refreshingly frank collection of personal essays, short fiction and cartoons celebrating female desire…A smart, scrumptiously sexy romp of a read.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“In this no-holds-barred collection of essays by ‘real women’ about ‘real sex,’ Jong has assembled an eclectic group of authors. [Sugar in My Bowl] is at its most profound when truth illuminates sex as a force in which these women found empowerment.” — Publishers Weekly
“Jong cast a broad net to bring together women writing about sex. The resulting anthology attests the wide range of female sexual experience.” — Booklist
“Sugar in My Bowl is proof positive that women can write seriously about sex and live to tell. It represents a remarkable smorgasbord of experience and perspective, and there’s a dish here for everyone.” — Shelf Awareness
“’The Vagina Monologue’‘s Eve Ensler, New York Times columnist Gail Collins, and Jong’s own daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, all opened up about bumpin’ uglies for this scintillating book we couldn’t put down. Sugar In My Bowl may not be better than the big O, but it sure comes close.” — The Frisky
“These pieces honestly and thoughtfully explore sex and its role in our society from a woman’s perspective, from its place in youth to the golden years....with Sugar in My Bowl Jong has curated a consistently eye-opening and thoroughly readable volume.” — LargeHearted Boy Blog
“The enticing, thoughtful Sugar in My Bowl proves to be a powerful exploration of women’s relationship to sex.” — Entertainment Realm
“This book is a Thanksgiving dinner in which each story is a dish more scrumptious, more touchingly homemade than the last. All are so very different, but together they comprise a joyous feast: [an] examination-cum-celebration of female sex and sexuality. A must-read.” — Gender Across Borders
“The passion, tragedy, and hope—offered by courageous women who express raw feelings that society tends to silence—will resonate.” — Library Journal
“A refreshing and new contribution to literature about women’s sex lives.” — HerCircleEzine.com
Abundant with affairs, marriages, motherhood and our sexual sense of mortality it is a thoughtful read, a perfect aperitif on a summer evening. The stories penetrate a secret space in our brains we so often neglect: our sense of sexuality.
[Sugar in My Bowl] runs the gamut from pornographic and hilarious to ironic and poignant. The result is a fun, quick, beach read, requiring as much or as little intellectual energy as the reader chooses to invest.
The women of this collection make the case that good sex is never exclusively about the act, but also about how you approach it.
Jong has crafted candid accounts of love and passion from renowned female writers into a sensual and sensitive read.
[A] fierce, fearless collection.
You can take these women seriously, laugh, squirm, and put hand over mouth at their weird, exciting, uncomfortable, joyous tales of ardor, while still admiring the agility of their prose.
Reading Sugar in My Bowl offers a rare opportunity to peer in on a breadth of intimate sexual experiences, a wide variety of motivations, and problems and desires you never knew existed-as well as the little thrill of stumbling upon a story that sounds like your own.
Jong cast a broad net to bring together women writing about sex. The resulting anthology attests the wide range of female sexual experience.
Jong cast a broad net to bring together women writing about sex. The resulting anthology attests the wide range of female sexual experience.
These pieces honestly and thoughtfully explore sex and its role in our society from a woman’s perspective, from its place in youth to the golden years....with Sugar in My Bowl Jong has curated a consistently eye-opening and thoroughly readable volume.
Sugar in My Bowl is proof positive that women can write seriously about sex and live to tell. It represents a remarkable smorgasbord of experience and perspective, and there’s a dish here for everyone.
A refreshing and new contribution to literature about women’s sex lives.
’The Vagina Monologue’‘s Eve Ensler, New York Times columnist Gail Collins, and Jong’s own daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, all opened up about bumpin’ uglies for this scintillating book we couldn’t put down. Sugar In My Bowl may not be better than the big O, but it sure comes close.
The enticing, thoughtful Sugar in My Bowl proves to be a powerful exploration of women’s relationship to sex.
This book is a Thanksgiving dinner in which each story is a dish more scrumptious, more touchingly homemade than the last. All are so very different, but together they comprise a joyous feast: [an] examination-cum-celebration of female sex and sexuality. A must-read.
[Sugar in My Bowl] runs the gamut from pornographic and hilarious to ironic and poignant. The result is a fun, quick, beach read, requiring as much or as little intellectual energy as the reader chooses to invest.
"Reading Sugar in My Bowl offers a rare opportunity to peer in on a breadth of intimate sexual experiences, a wide variety of motivations, and problems and desires you never knew existed-as well as the little thrill of stumbling upon a story that sounds like your own."
Award-winning writer and high-flying sexual truth-teller Jong (Love Comes First, 2009, etc.) partners with 28 collaborators to create this fierce and refreshingly frank collection of personal essays, short fiction and cartoons celebrating female desire.
The approaches to the still-taboo topic of feminine sexuality—at least, for women writers seeking approbation from the literary establishment—are, as Jong notes, "as varied as sexuality itself" and as exuberantly diverse as the contributors themselves. They range from such emerging talents as Elisa Albert and J.A.K. Andres to such luminaries as Rebecca Walker, Eve Ensler, Susan Cheever, Anne Roiphe and Fay Weldon, and represent a multiethnic, multigenerational swath of some of the finest women writers in the United States. Most of the pieces deal with the perennial themes of sexual coming-of-age, social and religious sexual hang-ups and lusty obsessions for male bodies (as well as female ones). Some deal with lesser-discussed—but no less important—subjects like procreative sex and eroticism in old age. Still others fearlessly explore fetishism, childhood masturbation, kink, sexual addiction and the excitement that, in the words of Linda Gray Sexton, comes from "the offering up of one's body like a sacrifice upon the temple of the bed." While sex is the source of life and some of the most powerful joys—and agonies—imaginable, it is also invariably linked to death. And that, writes Jong, "is part of our discomfort with it." But the contributors to this collection never make sex facile. As they work against cultural expectations and literary double standards, they make women's depictions of "doing it" just another aspect of a more fully realized human consciousness.
A smart, scrumptiously sexy romp of a read.
