Adult Nature, By Matthew Licht

Matthew Licht has a dirty mind, a dirty keyboard, and the very best intentions. His literary world is a place of sleaze and trash, religious sex cults, talking anuses, melancholy strippers and monkish opium smokers, sex in toilets, and voyeurism in the back of limos. And yet there’s also a genuine warmth and decency in his writing and in his view of the world. It’s an interesting contradiction. Or maybe it’s no contradiction at all.

—Geoff Nicholson, author of “Still-Life with Volkswagens” and “The Lost Art of Walking”

There’s a dark and edgy wit to Licht’s stories in this crazy, often comic collection, a wit that veers from erotic to emetic and back, and that has heart in it as well. A vividly imagined world where, as the man says, ‘joy and rage and thinking things could be different boiled down to thighs spread for a dollar’. But there is hope there too, among the strippers and the dealers and the no-hopers, and sometimes even a chance for escape, as the usually luckless hero of the final tale finds out.

—Charles Lambert author of “The Children’s Home” and “With a Zero at its Heart “