ANONYMOUS SEX

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.