Tan and Jordan conceived and edited “Anonymous Sex” while they were 9,000 miles apart — quarantined in New York City and Singapore, respectively. Tan explained that their approach was, in part, a way of prompting (or skirting) the modern question of cultural appropriation. “At a time when the literary and artistic world is debating who has the right to write which story, it was interesting to tell our authors, ‘You can write anything you want,’” Tan said. “So readers won’t experience each story through the narrow lens of ‘This was written by a female, trans, gay or cis male writer in India or Nebraska.’”
And then there were the practicalities. “I have zero worries about being seen as someone who writes about sex, but some of our authors shared that they were able to write more freely because their names were attached to the book, but not to their own stories,” Tan said.
Exposure. It makes me ill every time. Even if it is just a little newsletter that sixty people read. I thought it would get better as I grew older and published more things, but it has not. Walking naked into bookstores; walking naked into social media posts. Practicing some extreme yoga of radical vulnerability on the page.
But I have found my mentors over the years.
An unsettling truth that’s emerged over the course of our present pandemic is that while we are, in a sense, all in this together, so too are we each having our own and often wildly different experiences of the ongoing tragedy. Nagamatsu captures this weird balance of human collectivity and individuality.
On the broadcaster’s centenary, David Hendy’s lively new history is a reminder that the BBC’s present struggles—government rows, culture wars, foreign rivals and more—are modern manifestations of old problems. His account of the corporation also makes for an incisive history of Britain’s 20th century. Asa Briggs, who wrote the definitive, 4,000-page record of the BBC’s first 50 years, said that “to write the history of broadcasting…is in a sense to write the history of everything else”. The glowing screen of the BBC casts a revealing light on its audience.