Working Stiff

By Grant Stoddard

Harper Perennial, $13.95

“Having me write about sex was like having Steven Hawkins write about tap dancing,” writes Grant Stoddard in Working Stiff, his hilarious and, at times, hair-raising memoir of his days as a popular sex columnist for the hip New York-based Web site Nerve.com. The British-born Stoddard was barely legal and practically a virgin when his customer service job at Nerve morphed into a writing position that called for him to take on sexual dares and write about them in a column titled “I Did It for Science.”

For his first column, he and his girlfriend (she didn't last long) have sex on the New York subway—a pulse-racing quickie in an empty car on the A train. Subsequent adventures include a trip to a West Coast porn set, a jaunt to Leather Camp and a bizarre evening of semi-nude bridge. On one unnerving night, Stoddard watches (and timidly takes part) as one man sexually humiliates (and satisfies) another—with food, drink and urine playing prominent roles.

While the subject matter is outrageous, it is Stoddard's brilliant telling of it that keeps his story from becoming cheap or simply salacious. The witty lad from Sussex, England, has a way with words and spins these crazy tales with cleverness and charm, turning in one of the funniest reads in recent memory. He is particularly hilarious when recounting his lonely college years, painting a portrait of a young man least likely to become the Big Apple's resident “sexpert” with intelligently self-deprecating humor. —Christopher Cappiello

Homo Domesticus

By David Valdes Greenwood

Da Capo Lifelong Books, $22

All those staunch defenders of “the sanctity of marriage” who believe that same-sex marriage is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it should spend a few hours flipping through Homo Domesticus, journalist and playwright David Valdes Greenwood's heartfelt and heartwarming account of his 10-year relationship with his husband Jason. By the end of the 200-odd pages of the highly readable volume, it is clear that two men encounter all the same challenges and joys that a heterosexual couple deals with in trying to sustain a long-term relationship.

Valdes Greenwood writes candidly and comically about the innate differences between him and his husband—one the hopeless romantic, the other an eternal pragmatist. One raised on welfare, carefully making grocery lists and checking off items, the other blithely wandering through the supermarket piling the cart with whatever strikes his fancy. He confronts head-on the fact that husbands don't stop noticing beautiful men just because they are married (the couple had a commitment ceremony in 1995 and a quick legal wedding in Massachusetts in 2004), and he documents with care and honesty the challenges inherent in purchasing a home together and preventing household minutiae from mushrooming into full-scale domestic warfare.

Homo Domesticus is most moving when Valdes Greenwood recounts the events leading to the couple's adoption of a baby girl. After selling their home to help pay adoption fees, enduring a roller-coaster ride of indecision by the birth mother, and finally settling into an apartment with baby Lily, it is hard to imagine any reader considering the charmingly imperfect but loving trio anything but family. —C.C.