SOURCE: "The Upper Middle Classes are Restless," in The New York Times Book Review, January 5, 1986, p. 6.

In the following review, Cancogni faults the stories in Erotic Tales as lacking "that playful self-consciousness, that narrative delight and that titillating suggestiveness" that would justify the collection's title.

A lesbian's obsession with what she euphemistically calls "the thing" enslaves her to a pony. A nurse's morbid fascination with what she somewhat blasphemously terms "the Unknown God" leads her to the unwitting murder of one of her patients. A widower's desperate search for his lost wife eventually brings him to the realization that what he really wants, after all, is what his wife shares with thousands of other women of the same age and build: "While it's impossible to replace a face, the genitals, on the other hand, have certain physical similarities, are interchangeable." A woman longingly caresses the belt with which...