“LVIII Times a Year,” a glimpse inside the marriage of two deeply unpleasant people, seems to have been constructed to shrivel desire. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. A diverse array of authors explore the heights, depths, and mediocre middle of human sexuality.
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