My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up

If you feel like you haven't read enough S&M literature lately, might I recommend Stephen Elliott's My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up? He read at the Strand last night (with Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) and while it isn't my thing, I think he does write about kinky lifestyles with incredible tenderness and clarity (or perhaps they're not so kinky lifestyles, depending on what you define as the border between kinky and normal - it's fuzzier than you might otherwise think). Several of the stories are quite beautiful and all of them are emotionally moving.
Perhaps the best part of the reading, though, was listening to the woman who owns the Strand uncomfortably stumble over the titles. The authors of F.U.B.A.R.: America's Right-Wing Nightmare and How You Can Wake Up from It, who also attended the reading and then came out for drinks later with Steve and Nick Flynn, noted that when she introduced them at their reading at the Strand, her exact words were, "...the authors of F.U.B.A.R.... which stands for... well, you know."
In any case, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is a collection of short stories that Steve qualifies as fiction because he's not sure he wants the responsibility of "memoir." He's the founder of LitPAC and the Progressive Reading Series and he convinced Katherine Harris to let him on her press bus, so he's got to be cool enough for you to at least read his novel Happy Baby if you're not quite comfortable with the idea of reading a book on the subway that has a picture of a dominatrix on the cover.