“A bold collection of stories about sex that leaves you guessing who wrote what.” And, “27 Authors. 27 Stories. No Names Attached.” That’s the marketing concept behind Hillary Jordan and Clearly Lu-Lien Tan’s Anonymous Sex. Jordan and Tan approached a number of writers asking if they would send them stories that would be published anonymously with readers challenged to figure out which writer wrote which story. The project was stalled until the Pandemic hit and suddenly writers found time to participate.
So, who submitted stories that made the cut? Check out this list:
Featuring Robert Olen Butler, Catherine Chung, Trent Dalton, Heidi W. 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, and Edmund White
What are these sex stories about? Here’s a brief sample:
* A married woman has a BDSM-tinged encounter at a work conference
* Two young boys on a sleepover feel the first stirrings of desire
* In an artificially generated afterlife, anything can be sexual if you want it to be
* A young widow on a sleeper train shelters a criminal in her carriage
* A bisexual woman cheats on her wife with a baker
* Anyone can hire a holographic gigolo in 2098 – but one client gets a lot closer than she’d intended
* Female friends, sharing a hotel room, give in to long-repressed feelings
* The Rapunzel myth is rewritten…
Clearly, Jordan and Tan tried to provide something for everybody. But, that wide net of stories also creates a problem: some of the stories may not engaged readers interested in a specific erotic scenario.
Each year since 1993, Literary Review has presented the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award to the author it deems to have produced the worst description of a sex scene in a novel. Too bad the stories in Anonymous Sex don’t qualify. GRADE: C-
It would be hard to guess who wrote what when you only know a handful of the writers. Which is my case here.
Steve, I recognize some of the writers but I have no clue what story they wrote for ANONYMOUS SEX.
I’ll stick to romance novels, thankyouverymuch!
Deb, some of these stories have romantic aspects. But some take the course of “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”
Meanwhile, I have been unable to place my seven-volume epic about the sexual awakening of a boy and his frisbee. **sigh**
Jerry, on the plus side, the stories in ANONYMOUS SEX present characters of a span of ages and genders.
The gimmick of anonymous stories seemed destined to fail. Even if you know the writer, unless their style is unique, it is unlikely you could pick them out. So we are left with requiring very good stories.
Patti, you’re right. Style is a key identifier. But what the editors of ANONYMOUS SEX considered “very good stories” is questionable.
This sounds gimmicky, dull, and downright stupid. I’m wondering if Mary-Louise Parker is the actor, who I really like.
Michael, yes ANONYMOUS SEX is gimmicky. We’ll see if it sells and we’ll be dealing with ANONYMOUS SEX 2 in a couple of years.
Wow, this sounds absolutely awful. I don’t see a single original idea in that list. I wonder how many of these stories were rescued from the writers’ slush files?
Fred, you may have hit on the source of many of these stories: the reject drawer in their desks.
Yeah, a hard pass here too. Like Steve, I only read a few of these authors, and I doubt I’d be able to pick their style out well enough. Plus, the whole idea is one that doesn’t appeal to me at all.
Once again, George performs a service by reading a crappy book so the rest of us don’t have to!
Jeff, I’m more than happy to save you and other visitors to this blog from possibly wasting their time on ANONYMOUS SEX.
Do you remember Naked Came the Stranger from back in 1970?
It was an anonymous, every-chapter-written-by-a-different-author, sexy (?) sensation.
It was terrible. That being said, I still have the book and might pick it up again to see if it’s as bad as I remember it.
I think I’ll pass on this one.
Beth, I had forgotten about NAKED CAME THE STRANGER! It was a hot book back in 1969! Although it was credited to “Penelope Ashe,” the novel was in fact written by a group of twenty-four journalists led by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady.
And eventually inspired such round-robin (further) quasi-parodies as NAKED CAME THE MANATEE…
Todd, I think I have a copy of NAKED CAME THE MANATEE around here somewhere…
I may have heard of one author from that list! All in all, you could get the same effect by reading the letters to Penthouse!
Bob, trust me: the PENTHOUSE LETTERS are way better than ANONYMOUS SEX.
Susie Bright and Maxim Jakubowski both had best erotic fiction annuals for about a decade or so, and Rachel Bussel for about a half decade, later on, had a mixed fiction/nonfiction annual, all of which attempted to be broad-spectrum anthologies from a range of sources–erotica magazines, more wide-ranging fiction magazines, webzines, anthologies, collections and excerpts from novels and other longer work (in the case of Bussel’s), and as you and Patti note severally, that which excites one reader won’t necessarily work on another as both sexually-exciting and/or good and/or interesting fiction…and when it does, it’s more likely to happen in a single writer’s collection or in a theme anthology. But at least those series were mostly successful in ringing the bell in one or another or all measures with enough of their contents…pity this one seems that much more gimmicky. Even with a media crush on Parker, and perhaps one or two of the primarily-writer contributors, I suspect this one will tend to be a curio at best for me, as well. (Cleis Press and some others would also publish annuals with BEST OF THE YEAR-style titles, which were nonetheless usually collections of new fiction…and often rather intentionally limited in scope, to appeal to those readers with specific tastes.) Some of these writers are impressive talents, but along with liberating some of them from inhibitions, I guess, the gimmick also allows for some phoning it in, and not necessarily good phoning, either…
Todd, you pretty much sum up the appeal for best erotic fiction annuals and books like ANONYMOUS SEX. Clearly, there’s a market for this stuff.