Anonymous Sex

by Hillary Jordan, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Overview

A bold and playful collection of erotic stories written by some of the world’s finest writers. The twist? Each story is “anonymous,” allowing for tales as subtle or explicit, strange or familiar, tender or fierce as each writer wishes—leaving readers to guess who wrote what.

Welcome to the ultimate literary parlor game—a collection of unattributed erotic stories written by a stellar list of authors, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Awards, PEN Awards, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Edgar Awards, and more. Anthology editors Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan present an elegant, international collection of erotica, that explores the diverse spectrum of desire. There are stories of sexual obsession and sexual love, of domination and submission. There’s revenge sex, unrequited sex, funny sex, tortured sex, fairy tale sex, and even sex in the afterlife.

This seductive anthology is true to its name: while the authors are listed in alphabetical order at the beginning of the book, none of the stories are attributed, providing readers with a glimpse into the landscape of sexuality as explored by twenty-seven of today’s best-known authors.

Contributors include: Robert Olen Butler, Catherine Chung, Trent Dalton, Heidi Durrow, Tony Eprile, Louise Erdrich, Jamie Ford, Julia Glass, Peter Godwin, Hillary Jordan, Rebecca Makkai, Valerie Martin, Dina Nayeri, Chigozie Obioma, Téa Obreht, Helen Oyeyemi, Mary-Louise Parker, Victoria Redel, Jason Reynolds, S.J. Rozan, Meredith Talusan, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Jeet Thayil, Paul Theroux, Luis Alberto Urrea, Edmund White

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982177522
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Hillary Jordan is the author of the novels Mudbound and When She Woke. Mudbound was an international bestseller that won multiple awards and was adapted into a critically acclaimed Netflix film that earned four Academy Award nominations. Hillary is also a screenwriter, essayist, and poet whose work has been published in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Outside Magazine, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is author of the international bestsellers Sarong Party Girls and A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family. She is also the editor of the fiction anthology Singapore Noir. Cheryl was a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, InStyle, and The Baltimore Sun, and her stories and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, and Bon Appetit, among others. Born and raised in Singapore, she lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

A wild and varied romp into all kinds of sexual tales and fantasies. . . . this is a book you'll wanna keep on your bedside table." —Refinery 29

“The stories will satisfy you and fill you with longing. . . . as with a casual tryst, the best part of this book is the anonymity; the promise of no strings attached.” —New York Times Book Review

"A sizzling assemblage of top-notch literary fiction.” —Los Angeles Times

"Triumphantly carnal." —Times Literary Supplement (UK)

"An intoxicating combination of tension and release, not to mention artistry.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“There’s funny sex, revenge sex and senior sex, and tales of obsession, dominance and love. It’s hard to say what’s more entertaining: the guessing game or the stories themselves.” —TIME

“An early contender for the steamiest book of the year.” —PopSugar

"The writers of these steamy stories kiss but don’t tell." —Washington Post

“Jordan and Tan assemble a literary erotica anthology with a coy twist: individual stories aren’t attributed, allowing readers to guess which of the decorated contributors wrote what. The hush-hush conceit is fun. . . . standouts include ‘History Lesson,’ a BDSM story that builds real anticipation in few pages; the steamy fairy tale ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel’; and the unabashedly dreamy ‘Find Me.’ Noteworthy is the international scope of the stories’ settings.” —Publishers Weekly

"A diverse array of authors explore human sexuality . . . creates a fun mystery for the reader . . . beautifully crafted." —Kirkus Reviews

"An anthology in the form of a parlor game, Anonymous Sex invites readers into the imaginations of some our best novelists, letting us marvel at their talents and desires while wondering who wrote what and if it even matters. A book of pleasures and secrets—and great fun to read." —David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife

“Literally a pleasure to read. Erotic and well written, these stories sizzle and satisfy, snatched me up from the very first page. You won’t be able to put this book down!” —Nicole Dennis-Benn, bestselling author of Here Comes the Sun and Patsy

From the Publisher

11/08/2021

Jordan (Mudbound) and Tan (Sarong Party Girls) assemble a literary erotica anthology with a coy twist: individual stories aren’t attributed, allowing readers to guess which of the decorated contributors—including Louise Erdrich, Helen Oyeyemi, and Edmund White—wrote what. The hush-hush conceit is fun, though it may lead readers to expect these 27 stories to be more scandalous than they are; taboos are largely unbroken and too few authors go all in on sexiness. The self-consciously meta “Posseeblay” sees married writers insisting that “nobody ever writes real sex,” as if “boring and awkward and mundane and disappointing” sex weren’t abundant in contemporary fiction. “En Suite” offers a stronger portrayal of clumsy sex, with a drunken kiss between best friends leading to a funny, tender tale, but the oddly retrograde “LVIII Times a Year” tries for a slapstick approach and falls flat. The writers who embrace erotic fantasy fare better: standouts include “History Lesson,” a BDSM story that builds real anticipation in few pages; the steamy fairy tale “Rapunzel, Rapunzel”; and the unabashedly dreamy “Find Me.” Noteworthy is the international scope of the stories’ settings, which gives rise to one of the highlights in the enigmatic, Hong Kong–set “Hard at Play.” Though uneven, there’s plenty to make this worthwhile. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

2021-11-30
A diverse array of authors explore the heights, depths, and mediocre middle of human sexuality.

The first thing to know about this anthology is that it has a hook: The editors list the names of the 27 contributors in alphabetical order, but these names are not attached to the stories. The idea is that anonymity frees the authors and creates a fun mystery for the reader—although one wonders how many readers outside the worlds of writing and publishing will spend time puzzling over which entry is by Robert Olen Butler and which is by Helen Oyeyemi. The second thing to know about this anthology is that it is not a collection of “erotica.” It is true that each story presented here deals with sex in some way. It’s also true that there may well be readers who find “Woman Eaten by Shark Drawn to Her Gold Byzantine Ring”—a story that delivers precisely what the title suggests—stimulating. But, aside from a handful of stories—such as “Find Me” and “Vis Á Vis 1953”—these are not narratives in which explicit sex is the centerpiece or arousing the reader is the point. “LVIII Times a Year,” a glimpse inside the marriage of two deeply unpleasant people, seems to have been constructed to shrivel desire. “Now he thought of the woman’s gold tooth and ejaculated into the bowl” is the climax (sorry) of a set of scenarios called “Altitude Sickness.” In addition to the aforementioned image of joyless masturbation in an airplane toilet, these vignettes also include a man who can only get an erection aboard the Concorde and the first moments of what appears to be a plane crash. Set in a corporate-owned afterlife, “Asphodel” is a dose of existential horror that ends with an explosion of sexuality that may meet the Lacanian definition of jouissance but is not, in any kind of usual way, hot. There are some lovely stories here. The main character in “One Day in the Life of Josephine Bellanotte Munro” is a middle-aged woman who wants and who knows herself to be wanted. In “This Kind,” clandestine encounters with a baker allow a woman to escape the demands of home, but when he starts needing her emotionally as well as physically, she rediscovers the beauty of what she has with her wife.

Stories that range from charming to simply macabre, from beautifully crafted to barely formed.

Kirkus Reviews