27 Authors. 27 Stories. No Names Attached. A bold collection of stories about sex that leaves you guessing who wrote what.
ANONYMOUS SEX: An Erotic Anthology
edited by Hillary Jordan & Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Scribner, February 2022
(via The Gernert Company)
Bestselling novelists Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan present an elegant, international anthology of erotica that explores the diverse spectrum of desire, written by winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN Awards, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Edgar Award, and more. 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.
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 an uninhibited landscape of sexuality as explored by twenty-seven of today’s finest authors.
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.
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.
Bookworm Annie’s world has always been shaped by words. But her dream of writing a novel is long forgotten, and the man with whom she was supposed to spend the rest of her life has said ‘I do’ to someone else. She is devastated, and her friend persuades her to spend a few days in a hotel on Dartmoor to forget those painful events. One day, Annie stumbles across something very special: a notebook hidden in a red letterbox. Annie is deeply touched by what she reads in it, and when two pages that have been stuck together reveal the author’s address, she decides to track him down. Little does she suspect that her search will lead her to taciturn Jack, who is nothing like what she’d imagined the notebook’s author to be – but who nevertheless gets under her skin …
She is 30 years old and her name is Kieu, like the girl in the most famous work of Vietnamese literature. But she prefers to go by « Kim » because it’s easier in Berlin. In 1968, her parents had come to Germany from Saigon. She often wished for a family that didn’t have to become German first, but simply was. The loss of her Vietnamese roots has never bothered her. On the contrary. Until she receives a message. On Facebook. From her uncle. Who has been living in California since he fled.
We don’t choose the times we live in nor the times that shape us. Neither did Lud and Alma. Lud, who was born in 1899, and his brother Wilhelm revere Bach and Hölderlin, and share the same unattainable ideals. Wilhelm, who joins the Nazi party early on, measures others according to its standards; Lud measures himself by them, which torments him for the rest of his life. Alma lost her parents when she was a child, and her godfather Lud – who is only a few years older than her – and his housekeeper become a kind of new family for her.
Twelve-year-old Henrietta, whom everyone calls Henry, lives in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district and is longing for adventure. When her overprotective mother leaves her brand-new BMW on the street with her daughter asleep on the back seat, a young man gets into the unlocked car and drives off. He was only going to drive it round the block, but when Henry wakes up she convinces him to drive on. Sven, his girlfriend Nadja and Henry take off on a road trip, and the exuberant, taboo-breaking trio become a close-knit team as they take a journey that will change their lives for ever.