A married woman has a BDSM encounter at a conference. Sex in an artificially generated afterlife. A bisexual woman cheats on her wife with a baker … and all as written by Louise Erdrich or Chigozie Obioma or Téa Obreht or Paul Theroux or Helen Oyeyemi or Jeet Thayil or any one of 20-odd other authors. That’s the tease of a new collection of erotic short stories, Anonymous Sex.
Editors Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan write in their introduction that they wanted to “create intrigue” by not revealing which of the high-profile contributors have written which story: “Readers would have to guess.” A fatal premise is revealed: writing about sex is risky because one’s own predilections might be unmasked in the process. This is odd, given for example the recent anthology Kink, edited by RO Kwon and Garth Greenwell, whose contributors (including Alexander Chee and Carmen Maria Machado) felt no need for such a cover. Anonymous Sex feels old-fashioned, as if it’s arrived too late, too apologetically, on the stage.
