Freak's Amour, by Tom De Haven, is simply a masterpiece. This is some of the best weird literature that few seem to have heard of or remember. It's been out of print for 27 years. I started it once, long ago when I was just getting into science fiction and weird genre stuff. It was a bit arty and demanding for a teenage reader, and my interest wasn't up to the challenge at the time. Now, I have to give it very high recommendation after finding it again.

I suggest that anyone into classy lit as well as furries and pulp/pop culture go get it now, even if it takes your last two bucks. It's one of those obscurities that could be worth quite a lot if it was less available – and I say that as a professional book dealer – but it earned enough acclaim to get several printings, so it's cheap and easy to get secondhand. (In fact, I've just noticed a comic/graphic novel forthcoming: info below.)

… takes them to the dungeon, and does bad, bad things to them. If you thought VancouFur had an offensive theme, watch out! This one is truly NSFW, and best for those who appreciate wanton displays of licentious content.

The queer furry rapper's video, "Why the Boys All Love Me", follows an announcement for the making of a "nightmarish gay goth animal S&M" video at Halloween in San Francisco. It flaunts his mission to "put Satan back into hip-hop", and makes a sequel to a previous video featuring fursuiters. This time, Furry content is minimal, and indirectly limited to a few cameos and participation by dedicated furries who cross over between that group and others (such as the S&M fetish scene). Please consider it labeled that way up front, and view accordingly.

The Rumpus, a blog aimed at the challenging side of pop culture, brings up Furry Fandom's most divisive topic in Oh So Furry: The Rumpus Interview with Kilcodo.

Rumpus: Are cartoons sexy? Are animals sexy? Or are both of those statements irrelevant? Is it more the re-imaging idea?

Kilcodo: It depends on the person, but I think if you look at the way that we use language and the way we think about what is and isn’t sexy, we’ve constantly used anthropomorphic language. We call a sexy woman a fox. We call an older sexy woman a cougar. We call men bear, wolf. I’ve heard otter being used in the gay community. And I think that’s because as sexual beings we can see eroticism in many different organic forms, and I think because animals are beautiful, people like to meld the two forms together, so you have a human body and a majestic head of an animal, and people find that beautiful and even erotic.

Kilcodo's thoughtful answer brings to mind the Freudian term "Polymorphous perversity".

We recently stumbled across the works of Celeste M. Bath and Rael Bayellis. They’ve both worked on several stories of adult fantasy adventure (emphasis on adult), several of which fall into the “furry” category, and now they’ve begun to collaborate as well. One of there most recent works is Randi: A Shadowcats Story.  Here’s the plot: “Randall was a very ambitious and powerful combat mage. When he found out about the Shadowcats he hatched a plan to make himself more powerful.  Unfortunately for him it didn’t work.  After having his brains scrambled and then his body changed after almost being killed, Randall is now Randi and owned by one of the more powerful Shadowcats in the Kingdom. Randi finds she enjoys life mated to the big sexy beast, and while she is now the most powerful mage in the Kingdom and both her and her mate are involved in Royal politics and intrigue, she finds her ambitions have changed…” The novel is available as an e-book, both at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

image c. 2013 Celeste M. Bath & Rael Bayellis

The Mail & Guardian, South Africa's news weekly aimed at the 'intelligentsia', has published a story about furries which spends much time trying to explain sexual aspects of the fandom:

Johannesburg sexologist JacoPhillip Crous opines that "fursonas can be understood as totem representations ... an animal that's believed by the person to have spiritual or some other, possibly sexual, subjective significance, so the person adopts it as a personal emblem to which [he or she] feels drawn psychologically."

Interpreting this in a way akin to Jungian archetypes, Crous says the fursona is a form of "empowerment" and "self-transcendence" for the individual – and, for the sexually invested, the fursona is the "idealised totemic form that drives the erotic charge for the yiff enthusiast".

The piece quotes Tumblr bloggers, WikiFur, and Internet-based surveys, but no furry fans appear to have been interviewed for it. South Africa has a small furry community, but it is not mentioned within the article.

Eddie, a twenty-something struggling into adulthood as best he can, should be happy that he's got together with Dan, an old friend from art school; but there's a problem. Eddie is also Ford, an escort who has sex with strangers for money. To complicate matters further, he has a hopeless crush on his musclebound pimp, Nelson (as in 'Nelson's Column'). How long can Eddie hide his secret from Dan, and how did he get here in the first place?

Comics about the sex lives of anthropomorphic dogs are pretty common within the furry fandom. Comics on that subject by non-furries are rarer, especially comics praised by both Gay Times and Forbidden Planet International. So when a friend offered me The Lengths, a series of comics by Howard Hardiman about, in the artist's own words, 'dog-headed male prostitutes', I snapped it up.

The Lengths consists of eight issues, the last two in a double volume. Stapled black and white softcover, 28 pages per issue. Individual issues cost £2.50 or £3. A folder containing issues 1–6 is also available for £20.

Lagrange is one of Phil Geusz’s slighter pieces. The novella appeared in the Sofawolf Press magazine Anthrolations #8, November 2006, and was reprinted in the online Furry magazine Anthro #25, September-October 2009. Now here it is as a separate booklet from Legion Publishing in hardcover, trade paperback, or Kindle editions, your choice.

It may also be the only high-tech astronautical erotic comedy-drama that you ever encounter. Don’t miss it.

Legion Printing, January 2012, hardcover $5.99+$5 s&h (91 pages), trade paperback $3.99+$5 s&h, Kindle $2.99.

I recently posted an article on [adjective][species], Furries & HIV, that I think deserves wide attention. The furry community hasn't has a significant outbreak of HIV, but we're being placed at risk by attitudes towards safe sex.

I chatted with a HIV-positive furry (who was happy to be publicly quoted) and a furry porn actor, who both feel that the reluctance of furries to use condoms is a real problem. We also look at ways in which condom usage can be normalized within the community.

The article has generated a fair bit of interest in the couple of days since its publication, and at least one furry convention - Toronto's Furnal Equinox - is looking at adding a safe sex panel to their schedule as a result.

MC Crumbsnatcher's recently released first music video is set to be followed by a second video shoot on October 15, timed to benefit from Halloween season. The video is themed "S&M gay bar in hell", and is meant to cross over with leather/animal costuming popular among a subset of the San Francisco furry community. It will feature a story about witches who abduct Crumbsnatcher's love interest, a penguin.

A series of videos are set to follow, including a shoot in Las Vegas for a wedding scene of a unique nature.

As a club-goer most likely to get down to goth/industrial/EBM, I'm not qualified to say much about hip hop/rap. However, I know that MC Crumbsnatcher is a secret goth too, and that's my fursuited ass he's humping at 4:00 in the video, so let's do this.

The San Francisco Bay area hosts many subculture scenes. They bring people together who often stay separate in less busy places. MC Crumbsnatcher's ties might be tagged as spoken word/slam poetry, indie rap, electro, Nerdcore and Homocore. His Facebook page also lists Poo Joke Teller, ruiner of childhoods, and being a trained psychic. Let's add Furry to the list.

Content warning: Video contains extremely graphic sexual language and suggestive dancing.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Rukis (creator of Cruelty and co-creator of Red Lantern) on her latest publication. My questions and comments are not to be taken seriously.

[Isiah is the creator of furry video blog FurReview; his latest episode covers Communist import foxes and responses to the prior episode about the Ursa Major's 'Best Website' award.]

Me: Good evening, Rukis! Thank you so much for joining me tonight! It's a pleasure to have you on the show!

Rukis: Evenin'. Pleasure to be here.

Me: Now, you've recently come out with your second ever publication, Red Lantern: The Crimson Divine. Came in the mail today and I just finished reading it a few hours ago. I know you get this a lot, but if you could please just briefly explain what Red Lantern is about for those who don't know.

Rukis: Put simply, it's a drama/adventure/romance set in a quasi-Indian setting in the 1700s. If the world had been populated by anthro animals, and wasn't really the real world, at all. The story follows a prostitute in a brothel, his young trainee, and a group of naval soldiers fleeing a bunch of angry lizard folk.

E-commerce service PayPal has started a campaign to stop independent e-book publishers from including certain kinds of erotic content in their catalogs, should they be using PayPal to conduct business.

On Saturday February 18, PayPal began threatening to deactivate the accounts of indie book publishers and distributors, if they did not remove books containing certain sexual material – including themes and implied scenarios of: incest, pseudo-incest (including "daddy" fantasies, step-family), fantasies about non-consensual sex or rape, bestiality (widened to include non-human fantasy creatures), and BDSM.

The ban on "non-human fantasy creatures" has prompted some internet commentators to wonder where this leaves publishers of furry erotica, with Bernard Doove's chakats given as an example of what is banned under the new rules.

The Furoticon team is giving away a free pack of cards (NSFW) until December 31, or while supplies last, to those 18 or older in the USA.

Furoticon is an adult furry card game for two or more players in which you "play as a well-renowned Owner [...] dueling against one or more Owners for dominance over your opponents' harems".

Furoticon was first released at Anthrocon 2009. Since then, the game has scheduled events at many furry conventions.

Note: Registering waives rights to content submitted to furoticon.com

UK fur Snack Raccoon (aka. Dark Raccoon), reported to have died earlier this week, was experimenting with erotic asphyxiation at the time, former mate Ollie Pup has revealed:

IT WAS NOT SUICIDE! it was a sexual fantasy and a breathplay experiment that he did while we were out and went horribly wrong and resulted in what happened.

PLEASE if you are into breath control fantasies or have any kind of snuff fantasies or fetishes or whatever, remember what happened to him and think twice about what you do and for the love of Dark please just never try anything like that on your own.

Snack and Ollie co-hosted Furpile Radio, an online radio show which they founded in 2006. Snack also used to hold Super Smash Bros. tournaments at Eurofurence.

An opinion by the title of Room 366 or "How furries need to realize that sex and sexuality ACTUALLY EXIST" was posted on FNN as a result of the accidentally leaked dirty dancing fursuit video Room 366. [The article originated on AsylumCat (NSFW), a furry bondage site.] As a result, I find myself needing to talk a little about sexuality and the fandom.

While some of the reaction to the video could be considered a bit alarmist, this article as a reaction was also alarmist. The title was demeaning, implying that it's furries who are uneducated about sex and sexuality. I cannot briefly state every reason why this is just a flat-our wrong assertion, so I'll cut it down to two specific examples.

Writer's note: I have not linked to or embedded the video, because it is the property of EZwolf. The video was illegally re-uploaded; it is in the above articles. EZwolf's comments are here.