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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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.)