This is a book of anonymous short stores of sex. Not sure why they need to be anonymous, do the authors worry about their reputation?

The book really isn’t erotica. Some of the stories have mundane detail that goes on and made me wonder which part is supposed to turn the characters on, never mind the reader.

You could dip in and out of this but if you want erotica, buy erotica not this.

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for my views.

I enjoyed this collection of stories and really enjoyed the anonymous structure. The nature of a collection means you naturally aren't going to love every one, but I greatly enjoyed this overall and the varying themes, explicit nature and situations the reader is exposed to in this. It's a good, short read that at some points really gets you thinking, with a few stories still standing out and making me think about them now.

Erotica isn’t a genre I solely read but when written well, can really add to a story and liven up a book. I was intrigued by this one, a compendium of short stories written by a whole host of different writers anonymously attached to a story of their writing.

I hadn’t heard of any of the authors before so I couldn’t attach any of them to a story, but can certainly attest to the fact that most were written well, some were a bit weird but others entertaining. There was stories I liked more than others but overall, not bad.

I really loved the concept of this book (27 stories all from different authors) - It did mean I preferred some over others but I do think this is great book to dip in and out of.
I really love the artwork on the cover.
Overall I recommend for fans of erotic literature and for anyone who is intrigued by the concept.

Twenty-seven well-known writers, their imaginations unleashed by anonymity…

· 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…
An eye opening read!

This book had an interesting concept, but in practice a lot of the stories were a bit pretentious and bland.

27 stories all under one book, all in some way about sex.

Firstly take a look at the book cover, very clever artwork!

27 authors. 27 stories. All anonymous. This leaves a lot of intrigue as you read, wonder who wrote that specific piece. Because of this, it also allows the reader to explore authors they would not usually pick up.

However, although this allows the reader to read different authors, it also means you aren't going to like every story within the book. But, what I liked someone else may dislike and vice versa.

My favourite story was the first one called History Lesson, does this say a lot about me, probably! And I'm not sure how I felt about the retelling of the fairytale.

Overall this was an okay read and one to pick up and put down again.

Some great stories in this and some not so great, would love to know who wrote what as would follow up in other books by them but all in all enjoyed it ..

I loved the idea for this book and I enjoyed some of the stories very much. For those I would have liked them to be longer and more developed but for others I just wasn’t interested in the stories themselves- whether that was because they were too short for the writers to express themselves fully, or just a style I didn’t like, I’m not sure. This was a book to be picked up and read in short bursts. I’m glad i read it but I don’t think it lived up to the expectation for me

I was really intrigued by this book - eroticas written anonymously by a variety of different authors.

I will start by saying I wasn’t familiar enough with any of the listed authors’ works enough to guess which author had written which story and I actually think that’s a good standpoint to have as I went in with no expectations and could focus on the story itself. I enjoyed about half of the stories and the first in the book was my favourite. The stories in this collection are among other things sensual and bizarre, poignant and evocative. There is enough variety within the collection that you should find something that appeals to you. The trouble is you mind find as I did, that your wanted much longer in the world of the stories you enjoyed rather than moving on to the next story. I also think it’s a book to enjoy one story at a time over a period of weeks, rather than all in one go like I did.

Thanks to the authors, editors, publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to review an advanced copy of the book in exchange for an honest opinion.

"Anonymous Sex" is quite a risky project. The editors invited bunch of established writers and ask them to write erotica anonymously. In my opinion, this turns reading this collection into a fun guessing game and trying to figure out who is the author of which story. And to be honest, I'm ready to submit my bets on some of them.

The risk that comes with inviting various people to explore erotic topics in a literary way, is that some of the stories will turn out to be quite underwhelming or simply not great. However, erotica, as well as poetry, is highly personal but requires a certain level of mastery and craft to be truly palatable. That's to say, that some of the stories simply aren't.

But some of them are great, proving that eroticism means something else when different people approach the subject, and can be so much more and than raunchy one-dimensional stories that at first may be arousing, but aren't very intriguing or engaging. That's why I decided to give this collection a four-star rating, for simply being refreshingly different.

Thanks to HarperCollins for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

Warning: this book is not safe for work (unless you work for an erotic literature publisher, in which case, hi).

Erotic books are often confined to “lesser” literature, of those with little or no value in the serious literary world, but I don’t agree. Erotic scenes, or novels as a whole, when done well, can make for thrilling and enjoyable reads, especially in classics such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Controversial and edge, but something experienced by most of us at some point in our life. Natural but unseen. This book brings the private into the public.

I’ve made my dislike of short stories very clear, but I feel these are the perfect length. Any longer and they become a bit too over the top, but any shorter and the plot and the characters would suffer.

There are some realistic stories, some abstract, some fantasy, some explicit, and some subtle, but they all have an honest primal human element that comes with intimacy.

"After sex, every animal is sad, except the rooster and the woman".

I applaud Anonymous Sex for teaching me that erotica isn't simply smutty tales centred around penetrative sex between a man and a woman but the intimate, deepest desires of everyone and anyone. The book is a compilation of short, erotic stories from a group of famous authors with a twist - the reader doesn't know who wrote each tale.

Given the nature of short stories, not all of them sat right with me. Especially one that was effectively non-consensual exploitation of an ESL student that was presented with confidence and the privilege that I fear seeps into that authors real-world views. Fortunately, the majority steered clear of the grey area, promoting consent, LGBTQI+ explorations and varying meanings of 'desire'.

My personal favourites were ones that totally twisted the genre outside of my expectations, where one author seemingly wrote to another, anonymously recalling what they once shared. A combination of love and lust, ruined by the mundane and normality relationships are often subjected to. Another where the author presented others attempting to write a tale that would challenge the genre - and ultimately presenting real world sex as something other than the vanilla stereotype it has been subjected to.

I'm always open to throwing away the outdated views of generations past and challenging true desire and this book did that. Alas though, it loses points for the tales with non-consent. I'd strongly like to see that removed before recommending this.

Thank you to NetGalley for the Arc.

I tried my very best to enjoy these stories but it is a very smart and thrilling concept but unfortunately some chapters I found myself rushing through and skimming over. I know they are mini short stories but maybe if the chapters were slightly longer I could get a feel of each storyline instead of feeling rushed. On a more positive note there were definitely chapters that I really enjoyed and thought worked very well.

I really did like the concept of this book of short stories. Known authors get to write short stories about sex anonymously. I'd heard of or read a handful of the authors involved and felt this might make an interesting change of reading. I see that the blurb says that there are 27 stories. My copy is a pre publication one but I appear to have read 31.

These stories do cover a fairly wide range of encounters. Maybe worth noting that most of them are heterosexual though. Some are short, some are long. Some I got and some I simply didn't. Probably unsurprisingly for this sort of anthology there were ones that I really liked and worked for me. Equally there were quite a few that were far more ordinary.

I'd prefer people to discover these for themselves however I will comment on three of these. I really liked "Rapunzel". This is definitely not a story for children however I found it very entertaining and well written. It's a reworking of the fairy tale and I thought it was very creative. For something erotic (and not that many were for me) then "Vis a vis 1953" was very good indeed.

Ultimately there was one story that was simply so well written and powerful that it blew me away. It was "The Memory of Hands". It was tender, felt very real and simply a very good read. I've not really read anything quite like that or that good in a fair while. While I do like the idea of anonymous authors here the snag is that I have no idea who wrote my favourites stories so I can't try more of their work. In a sense that is a pity (for them and me).

Those three stories have stayed with me despite the fact that I finished this book a month or so ago at the time or writing this. Looking through my notes there were a few others that resonated with me to some degree. However the remainder didn't do a lot for me. Despite this I would still suggest this is well worth a try if the general idea appeals to you. I don't know what you might find in these that work for you but I'll bet some of then do.

ANONYMOUS SEX - ARC 📚
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Twenty-seven well-known writers, their imaginations unleashed by anonymity…
· 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…
In this diverse and ground-breaking collection there is something for everyone, from teenage experimentation to sex in the afterlife, from married couples pushing their boundaries to illicit encounters between strangers. Perhaps you will guess which story was written by your favourite author, perhaps you won’t, but the excitement is in the journey.
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I’m not fully sure how I feel about this book. The face that it’s a collection of short stories meant that some of them I struggled to get into and then the ones I actually enjoyed I was gutted that they were over so quick! It was good to pick up and have a quick 5 minute read though when I had a moment as I could just read a few pages at a time. Definitely some of the stories I preferred to others. Probably wouldn’t read again purely because of not being able to get into it properly!
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⭐️⭐️

An eclectic mix of stories. I'd hazard a guess that there's something here for everyone. I think this book strikes a good balance between sensuality and sexuality, with plenty of overlap between the two.
The premise of the book is an interesting one, and I haven't read much else by many of the listed authors. This is an interesting anthology of erotic writing by a wide range of writers. It is interesting to speculate how different the book might have been if the stories were given direct attribution.
I'd recommend this collection to anyone who would like to explore a range of short erotic fiction.

The stories in this book were well written, but the book completely failed to keep the promise of being Excotic. In my opinion the book should be renamed Anonymous stories instead of Anonymous sex.

Anyways Thanks to the publishers, netgqlley and the authors for this ARC.

This was an extraordinary well-penned anthology of stories, but the actual tone of each did not match and left me feeling at odds with the quick-altering tone shifts. I liked the differing genres this contained and liked the stories all equally as well, however.

Sadly I expected more from these but they fell a bit flat and struggled to keep my attention. Some amusing moments but in the main was left a little disappointed.