Sometimes surprising, always stimulating — this book offers a snapshot of America’s complex sexual practices and mores as seen through Cleis’s unique lens. It is the best nonfiction sex journalism of the year in one unforgettable book. In a single generation, Cleis Press has fundamentally changed the way people talk — and what they read — about sex and gender. Founded by Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste in 1980, the press’s mission is to explore and celebrate sex in all its forms, with a decided tilt toward the queer and the subversive. For the first time, Cleis’s founders bring their own sex-positive sensibilities to bear on one of their most popular series. In Best Sex Writing 2006, they’ve collected the year’s most challenging and provocative nonfiction articles on this endlessly evocative subject.

The essays here comprise a detailed, direct survey of the contemporary American sexual landscape, a landscape Newman and Delacoste helped shape with such ground-breaking books as Sex Work and The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex. Major commentators both in and out of Cleis’s stable of writers examine the many roles sex plays in our lives in these literate and lively essays.