The subtitle of this piece is “down the ladder from Playboy to Maxim,” and that about sums it up. Consider that, once upon a time, the best markets for fiction in the US were the “big four” magazines: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and — yes — Playboy. Hef’s mag ran stories by Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Styron, Nabokov, Cheever, and others.

Imagine that in FHM. Hell, imagine anything longer than 200 words in one of those lad mags.