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April 14, 2022
Hillary Jordan's & Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan's Playlist for Their Anthology "Anonymous Sex"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Anonymous Sex is both though-provoking and surprising literary erotica anthology and a whodunit. The reader is left to guess which author wrote which story. Clever and rewarding.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Jordan and Tan assemble a literary erotica anthology with a coy twist: individual stories aren’t attributed, allowing readers to guess which of the decorated contributors wrote what. The hush-hush conceit is fun. . . . 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."
In their own words, here is Hillary Jordan's & Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan's Book Notes music playlist for their anthology Anonymous Sex:
Anonymous Sex is a collection of erotica by 27 of the world’s finest authors, co-created and co-edited by Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. It’s an anthology with a twist: none of the stories is ascribed, so readers have to guess who wrote what.
The stories range far and wide across the landscape of desire, as well as the globe. There’s straight and queer sex, real and imagined sex. Stories of domination and surrender, love and tenderness. Sex on trains, sex in prison, sex in the afterlife. Three-way sex, fairy tale sex, and holographic sex. Sex as rebellion and sex as holy. Sex in Hong Kong, Nigeria, France, India, Australia, Florida, and Brooklyn.
For the soundtrack to Anonymous Sex, Hillary and Cheryl each picked five tales and chose songs to accompany them, with input from the author when possible. You can order the book here, or from your local indie bookseller.
Story No. 3, “En Suite,” centers on Anne and Linney, a pair of bffs on a weekend birthday trip. After one too many drinks, they return to their hotel room and overhear a couple next door having steamy, vocal sex. The erotic encounter stirs up memories of their own flirtations in college, especially for Anne, a bisexual who has a secret crush on her best friend. In the story, the couple next door listens, post-coitus, to Nina Simone. I’ve chosen her cover of “Feeling Good." The song has been recorded by everybody from Coltrane to Michael Bublé to Lauren Hill, but nobody matches Nina Simone’s version for pure heat. —HJ
Story No. 7, “Hard at Play,” is a story in which two lovers do a tentative dance around each other when Hong Kong comes to life at night. And “Labyrinth” by Mondo Grosso, the lead single from the 2017 album Nandodemo Atarashiku Umareru (Reborn Again and Always Starting New) is imbued with the sultry sexiness of Hong Kong after dark, and all its seamy possibilities. The song, sung by actress and dancer Hikaru Mitsushima in what sounds like whispered sighs set to an intoxicating, pulsating beat, will grab you on its own but the music video is just mesmerizing and brings “Hard at Play” to life. Directed by Takeshi Maruyama and filmed in the neon dream that is Hong Kong at night, the video follows Mitsushima as she elegantly twirls and slides through the labyrinthine cityscape with its towering buildings, midnight eateries and rain-slicked streets as she sings:
A midnight paradise
I dive in
Without even taking a breath
A paradise just for you and me
—CT
Story No. 9, the unabashedly romantic “Find Me,” is set in the 1930s. Eloise, a young widow, is headed west by train to marry her boring, sexually unadventurous husband’s equally unexciting cousin. Alone in her opulent first-class cabin, she revels in her freedom and the sensuality of her surroundings. On night three of her journey, the train is robbed, and a handsome thief who is part of the gang slips into her cabin . . . and shows her how glorious intimacy can be. Billie Holiday’s “Body and Soul” which is of that era, perfectly captures Eloise’s longing for this seductive stranger. —HJ
Story No. 11, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” is a sexy riff on the familiar fairy tale, adapted from older styories and published in 1812 by the German Brothers Grimm. Their “Rapunzel” is considerably grimmer than this version; there’s no evil witch, and nobody’s eyes are put out by thorns. But there is a long-haired maiden in a tower yearning for love, and a handsome prince all too willing to accommodate her. What better accompaniment than Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, with its explosive—and decidedly happy—ending? —HJ
Story No. 15, “Love Doll,” takes you to Honolulu, where English teacher Stan Blanton falls for one of his students, Miss Van, a young Vietnamese immigrant. In the sweltering heat of late-night Honolulu, Blanton starts following her after class and his obsession grows. “Kalua,” a Hawaiian love song from the 1951 movie “Bird of Paradise,” conjures some of the passion of this story. Its lyrics speak of falling in love with a woman named Kalua on a Polynesian island --
“Where the tradewinds blow
Soft and low
Our love will blossom bright
In the night.”
Hawaiian trio Hui Ohana does an enchanting version of it here. —CT
Story No. 17, “Odi et Amo” explores the surprising lust that grows between two people who feel “hate at first sight” when they meet. The year is 1941 and painter Leonard and nursing student Zelda meet during a weekend with friends Northern California, trading barbs and glares until it becomes impossible to ignore the heat that’s growing between them. “Ain’t Misbehavin” by Fats Waller, a jazzy, early swing song written in 1929 and popular in the 1940s, is a terrific pairing for this story. —CT
Story No. 20, “Tomorrow Morning” transports you to Nigeria, where two lovers, Nneka and Lekan, encounter each other in the noisy, teeming streets of Lagos and tumble into bed. It’s a poignant story of finding love, being separated, and then having to press on and find a way to reconnect again. The healing and restorative power of sexual connection ends up triumphing here, and “Essence” the 2021 song by Nigerian singers Wizkid and Tems, in which two people express their desire for each other, embodies that sentiment. Written by Wizkid and released on his Made in Lagos album, “Essence” was the first Nigerian song in history to hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and it received a Grammy nomination for “Best Global Music Performance.” —CT
Story No. 21, “Holo Boy, 2098” imagines a future in which virtual sex is not only anonymous and readily available, but almost as satisfying as the real thing. It follows a young scientist named Inesz whose desire is inextricably linked to her sense of smell, and who discovers olfactory nirvana when a virtual encounter turns actual. Though it’s retro rather than futuristic, I picked the unabashedly sexy “Smell the Funk” by Chicago blues master Buddy Guy, off his 2008 album Skin Deep. I think Inesz would approve. —HJ
Story No. 22, “The Great Artist,” takes place during the Belle Époque. Inspired by Edgar Dégas’ painting “Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando,” it tells the tale of a renowned Impressionist’s obsession with a remarkable mixed-race performer at the Cirque, a popular venue in fin-de-siècle Paris whose real-life devotees included Dégas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Seurat. To accompany the story, I chose a work by Débussy, one the greatest and most sensual of the Belle Époque composers: the third of his Trois Nocturnes, aptly titled “Sirènes” (“Sirens”). —HJ
Story No. 26, “Interruptus,” features two classical musicians who, after months of flirtation and seduction, find themselves gliding into an unusual pas de troix. Music and the heat of yearning from afar is what has drawn the lovers together, beginning when one, a violinist, plays the last movement of “The Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto” through a bedroom wall as an opening salvo. The concerto is adapted from one of China’s most well-known folk tales, and its narrative of a tragic romance that ends up with the lovers dying and transforming into butterflies in order to be together, forms a poignant backdrop for the blossoming, forbidden attraction in “Interruptus.” American violinist Gil Shaham does the most marvelous job of this piece in this 2007 recording with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. —CT
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.
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