Nerve’s print magazine, out this week, comes as something of a revelation.
    This, one realizes, is what literate smut was always meant to be.
     An online literary magazine devoted to frank discussion of sex in all its forms and permutations, Nerve.com is not for everybody.
     But its print offspring is more approachable, less high-minded and more fun. It’s still not for everybody, but it’s appeal is considerably broader.
      Practically everything that Nerve.com tries to do online Nerve magazine does better in print.
    To be fair, this probably has as much to do with the actual experience of reading a physical magazine as it does with the relative merits of the two publications.
     Flipping through the magazine, one is reminded what a simple pleasure it is, well, just to flip through a magazine--scanning for eye-catching art or intriguing headlines, reading the callouts and sidebars while skipping the articles, even checking out the advertising.
    For sheer recreational pleasure, there’s just no virtual equivalent to it.
    Then of course there’s the readability factor. This is an especially important consideration for a magazine like Nerve: It’s an awful lot easier to settle into a long short story in the comfort of one’s own bed/armchair/bathroom than hunched over a keyboard, one hand on the mouse.
   But even beyond the reading experience, the magazine has definite advantages over its online counterpart.
     For starters, the art naturally comes out much better. The magazine, like the site, is heavy on photography, most of it nude portraits of unconventionally attractive people.
     Showcasing the power of print is a clever new department created for the magazine called "Eye of the Beholder," in which three different photographers shoot the same model—nude, of course—with vastly different results.
    There’s also a portfolio from photographer Nan Goldin, and a department called "Show and Tell" which this month devotes itself to art inspired by the color pink.
   Furthermore, without drawing too many conclusions from the first issue, the quality of the writing seems improved. While stories on the web site come across not infrequently as didactic, academic or just plain boring, the writing in the magazine is loose and breezy without ever being sloppy.
      Put simply, the writers seem to be having fun for a change.
     Lisa Carver, whose memoirs are consistently one of the highlights on Nerve.com, writes a clever and unconventional hands-on sex advice column entitled "Do As I Say," while Maggie Cutler contributes "The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons," a mainstay on the site. In this month’s installment the title character imagines getting it on with Al Gore.
      There’s a lot of fine narrative writing, starting with the department "Diary," a collection of first-person vignettes from different writers. Later on, author Robert Olen Butler contributes a hilarious short story called "Alvin Happens Upon the Greatest Line Ever." (Not to give too much away, but the line turns out to be, "Jennifer Platt, the world’s coming to an end! We must have sex!")
     Even funnier is a mock shopper’s guide, "Hot Dot Com," a pornographic spoof of the product-plug advertorial spreads increasingly common in high-end magazines.
    With goofs like "Hot Dot Com" and "Do As I Say," the magazine is a big improvement on the PhD-seminar tone of its online forebear.
   That's not to say the prose doesn't occasionally get a bit turgid, as it does in Jack Murnighan's dissertation on table sex.
   It's also not to say that Nerve magazine should supplant Nerve.com. Part of the magazine’s vitality comes from its close relationship with the web site; the inclusion of chat room transcripts and other reader comments posted to the web site give the magazine a real sense of community.
     But as one reader wrote in, complaining about Nerve.com, "[O]verintellectualizing sex ultimately misses the point."
    The magazine is available through Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores, with most subscriptions being sold through the Nerve.com web site.

-Jeff Bercovici  is a staff writer for Media Life.

              
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