From Publishers Weekly
Lubed for publication during National Condom Week, this anthology of short fiction, comic essays and verse offers a variety of flavors and textures. Anne Rice, John Irving, Martin Amis and other luminaries are represented by excerpts from novels and collections. Most of the 29 reprints and originals are short, three or four pages long, and they range from the banal and sophomoric (e.g., Cathryn Alpert's "Condomology in Twelve Easy Lessons") to the surpassingly lovely (e.g., April Lindner's poem, "Condom"), hilarious (e.g., William Feustner's "Flush"), or illuminating (e.g., "Campmates" from Armistead Maupin's Babycakes). Condoms are at least mentioned in every entry: sometimes they are incidental and sometimes central. Most often they are utilized for their metaphorical force in tales of love forestalled or diminished by memory and doubt. Many pieces involve same-gender lovers, and tenderly, too, in stories and verse full of humor and mourning. There are some longer pieces: in T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Modern Love," the volume's opener, a hygiene fanatic makes her lover wear a full-body condom pending the results of a physical. Nathan Englander writes of a Hasidic Jew whose rabbi directs him to a prostitute in order to save his marriage from "unbearable urges"; piously refusing a condom, he contracts a venereal disease. AIDS comes up with some frequency, of course, along with the longing for a freer sexual era. The awkwardness of manipulating rubbers is a recurrent source of amusement. The mix of classic excerpts and decidedly '90s sensibilities helps to give this sexy sampler a historical and psychological range responsible to the current sexual climate while frankly celebrating the condom's place in literature. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
Life has its private moments, but art knows no boundaries. Writers such as Martin Amis, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Michael Benedikt, Kim Addonizio, Michelle Chalfoun, Armistead Maupin, John Irving, Anne Rice, and Elizabeth Benedict, all of whom contribute to this collection, have described in story, novel, or poem the sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes pathetic moments that confront their characters when dealing with this artifact of contemporary civilization, the condom. Male and female, young and old, straight and gay--their characters reflect the changes in concepts of intimacy, contact, contagion, and death as they are connected with the act of making love. They are some of the most vital subjects confronting our society today. These twenty-eight pieces are often wry, witty commentaries on human foibles, things we might never discuss with a stranger but would love to read about. Here is a collection with a high degree of literary merit as well as a good sense of humor. Getting It On will be published in February 1999 to coincide with National Condom Week. With a literary pedigree as well as a social conscience, this collection is certain to engage, edify, and amuse.

About the Author
Mitch Roberson is studying poetry at Vermont College. Julia Dubner has a master of arts in fiction writing from the University of California at Davis and works in publishing. Both live in Jersey City, New Jersey.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The contributors to this anthology describe in story, novel, or poem the sometimes touching, sometimes funny moments that confront men and women when dealing with this artifact of contemporary civilization, the condom. With a literary pedigree and a social conscience, this collection is certain to engage, edify and amuse.

SYNOPSIS

Don't let the title fool you: Getting it On: A Condom Reader is no simple glimpse through the peephole of latex-covered pornography. The editors have carefully selected these pieces from stories, poems, and chapters from novels in which the condom plays a "thematically integral" role. Anne Rice, T. C. Boyle, Armistead Maupin, John Irving, and Martin Amis are just some of the authors who analyze the humor, pathos, caution, fear, and hope -- in a word, the humanity -- that the condom represents for everyone who has tried to make such a connection.

FROM THE CRITICS

Polina Shklyanoy - Playboy.com

Condoms are a slip-and-slide for adults, an ooey-gooey time-out, a talisman of pubescent power. They aren't so much an object, but a concept. And Getting It On: A Condom Reader explores their role in our lives -- from the first time we meet them (most often as wrinkled and spent casings in a parking lot on prom night) to the first time we use them to the first time we don't.

For something so common and mundane, the effect of the condom is far-reaching. Amis' piece is one of more than 20 offerings from authors and poets including Anne Rice and Armistead Maupin. Through the work of these writers, A Condom Reader becomes a primer on Nineties' prophylactic politics, a forum for discussion from the ridiculous to the sublime.

George O'Brien

Don't let the title fool you: Getting it On: A Condom Reader is no simple glimpse through the peephole of latex-covered pornography. The editors have carefully selected these pieces from stories, poems, and chapters from novels in which the condom plays a "thematically integral" role. Anne Rice, T. C. Boyle, Armistead Maupin, John Irving, and Martin Amis are just some of the authors who analyze the humor, pathos, caution, fear, and hope -- in a word, the humanity -- that the condom represents for everyone who has tried to make such a connection. Of course, among all the humanity, there are a lot of naked bodies, warm thighs, engorged members, and ample buttocks in these pages. The book strikes a perfect balance between the sex, the analysis, and the hilarity. And the best pieces have all three.

Take the opening story: T. C. Boyle's "Modern Love" depicts in the driest and wittiest of voices the potential loss of intimacy that the condom symbolizes in our age of disease and death. Boyle's narrator is subjected to a Rabelaisian catalogue of medical exams "that would have embarrassed an astronaut" in order to satisfy his girlfriend's obsessive fear of disease. After she urges him to wear a full-body condom, he relents, for fear of losing a chance at love: In the end, I did it. I looked at her crying, crying for me, and I looked at the thin sheet of plastic clinging to her, and I did it. She helped me into the thing, poked two holes in for my nostrils, zipped the plastic zipper up the back, and pulled it tight over my head. It fit like a wetsuit. And the whole thing -- the stroking and the tenderness and the gentle yielding -- was everything I'd hoped it would be.

Almost. II. "For the Prevention of Disease Only"

Not all of the pieces collected here are so larger than life. The condom is typically the silent third party to a couple groping their way through the obscurity of intimate relationships. After all, in our day the condom can be a paradoxical symbol: "Sure, I'll have sex with you...just don't kill me." Friction without fusion. Sex without love. Touching without feeling. A number of the pieces in Getting it On explore the boundaries and obstacles that the condom seems to represent. Generation gaps, new health concerns, differing emotional expectations -- something always seems to be getting in the way, doesn't it?

III. What's in a name?

Rubber, raingear, jimmie protector, mitten, sin against God. Condoms can mean different things to different people. For a young woman who grows up with a travelling circus, condoms are a small but important step toward freedom from the men who abuse her and control her life. For a young widow in a story by Hester Kaplan, the prospect of buying condoms and sleeping with her new boyfriend might be one step too many. The fear of a new relationship drives her back to the memory of her dead husband.

What if condoms and sex mean different things to two people at the same time? How do you think a sexy vampire from the 1700s would react to today's women? Check out the excerpt from Anne Rice's "The Body Thief" for an intriguing answer to that one.

IV. "Now for the sexy bits." --Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

How can you turn down great writing about condoms? Sex and books, two of life's greatest pleasures; the two training wheels that keep me from tumbling headlong over the handlebars and into the abyss. I loved Getting it On because I'm a voracious reader of all types, forms, and methods. The novel, the short story, the poem, the delicious genre-bending poème en prose. The long novel whose end brings so much sadness. That book of German history that I read on the side when the novel was getting a little boring. There are books I like to read in my book club, and there are those that give me solitary comfort in the privacy of my own bathroom. When I'm in the bookstore sometimes, I even thumb through Judy Blume. And sometimes, at the end of the day, I fall asleep with my face buried between the covers of a good book. But I never go to the library without my glasses.

Getting it On is its own little library of sexy entertainment. And don't feign disinterest -- there's nothing to be ashamed of. What makes this collection so appealing is its variety and its familiarity. We've all been there: How the hell do I get this thing on? Where did it go? Um, yes, a box of Ramses extra sensitive, please. No, ma'am, not the extra large. Oops!

If any of that sounds familiar, then Getting it On should be just the right fit for your bedside table.

--￯﾿ﾽbarnesandnoble.com

Kirkus Reviews

If you share "a belief in the hopefulness of sexuality," this astonishing collection of some of the worst writing on the current scene, all of it about condoms, may be the book for you. A badly mismatched collection of 29 stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from famous books you've probably already read, it exhibits all of the narcissism, vapidity, and plain old ignorance that immediately spring to mind nowadays at the mere mention of "creative writing." There are, first of all, the retreads (some of them pretty good) taken from works like T.C. Boyle's "Modern Love" (a typical Boyleian fantasy involving a hypochondriacal girlfriend and a "full-body condom"); Armistead Maupin's "Campmates" (about gay men "discovering" condoms in the early 1980s); John Irving's teenaged sex scene from The World According to Garp; Martin Amis's sexual reminiscences from The Rachel Papers; and Anne Rice's very unsafe vampire sex from The Tale of the Body Thief. Then there are the poems, many of them silly or pretentious ("a Houdini risking / his life time and again / inside an airtight skin"). But the real discoveries are to be found in the "new" section, which includes such treats as Kim Addonizio's "A Brief History of Condoms" (a pseudo-spoofing of academic prose); Cynthia Baughman's "Safety Speech" (Cambridge graduate students examine the sexual politics of movie voice-overs); and Cathryn Alpert's "Condomology in Twelve Easy Lessons" (a sort of top-twelve list of condom embarrassments). Nathan Englander's "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," describing an Orthodox Jew who seeks outs prostitutes during his wife's "unclean" periods, is one of the few stories of any interest. Pompous and/or foolish; aboutas pleasant and sensitive as-well, take a guess. .