I reviewed Tom Crewe’s debut novel The New Life in the 7 December 2023 issue of the New York Review of Books (subscription required).
Category: sexuality
Prospect Park, 9/24/2019: Slug copulation!
First day back in Prospect Park, and I witness slug copulation! I had watched a video of this once, and theoretically knew what to expect, but was nonetheless astounded. After the slugs anchored themselves to the side of the lamppost with a sort of slime cord, they entwined, and each then extruded a pale inner corpus, the two of which also entwined, into a ball that looked a little like the tube of a compact fluorescent light bulb. Which then gently pulsated. The suspension and pulsation lasted so long that in the end I let the impatient dog drag me away. By the time the dog and I passed by this lamppost again, on our way home, the animals had finished, though I did spot one of them trundling diagonally away from the site of their pleasure with a postcoital, well, sluggishness.