As if… Though I think they’ve used the real name of someone.
1 September 2026 from debonemmanuelle.translator@gmail.com
Dear Andy,
What stayed with me in Six Positions is the way the book turns the question of sexual “position” into something much larger than sex. In “Why I’m,” the narrator’s refusal to accept the role others try to assign him as an Asian man becomes a sharp examination of how racial stereotypes can shape desire itself. That tension between erotic freedom and the assumptions imposed on the body is what gives the collection considerably more depth than its “sex writing” label suggests.
I also found the way you move between fantasy, humour, vulnerability and cultural identity particularly effective. The stories can be playful and unapologetically erotic, but underneath that surface they keep returning to the question of who gets to desire freely, and who is expected to fit someone else’s idea of what they should be.
The book was published in English by Green Candy Press in 2005, and I could not find a German edition. That leaves a very particular gap: a work that has already had a life in gay-literary and erotic anthologies in North America, Australia and elsewhere has never had the chance to enter the German-language queer literary conversation in its own book form. Your writing has appeared widely in anthologies and journals, and Six Positions itself grew out of stories that had already found readers through publications such as the Best Gay Erotica series.
I think that matters because a German edition would not need to present Six Positions simply as erotica. It could be positioned as queer literary writing that uses sex, humour and desire to examine race, identity, stereotypes and the politics of the body. That combination, particularly the perspective of a gay Asian writer negotiating how he is seen within queer culture, is what makes the book distinctive.
I’m Emmanuelle Debon, a literary translator working across English and several European languages. My approach is always to preserve what makes a writer’s voice recognisable, including its rhythm, humour, ambiguity and emotional texture, rather than simply transferring the words from one language into another.
I would be interested in discussing the possibility of bringing Six Positions into German and what a German-language edition could look like for the book today.
Warm regards,
Emmanuelle Debon.