JUST PERVS

In her second short-story collection, JUST PERVS, Jess Taylor joins a chorus of female voices—Mary Gaitskill (Bad Behaviour ), Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts ), Chris Kraus (I Love Dick ), and Naja Marie Aidt (Baboon)—who speak honestly and openly about sex and women's quests for fuller and richer experiences.

With an arrestingly frank literary voice and plenty of sly humour, Jess Taylor explores the strange oppression and illumination that desire can create, the bewilderment of adolescence, the barriers to intimacy we discover within ourselves and the ones imposed on us, all while championing expressions of female sexuality in their many forms. In “Tight ‘n Bright,” a twenty-something woman goes home to have sex with a guy she met on an afternoon lake cruise, only to realize that he disgusts her, but not as much as her own behaviour does. In “The Puberty Drawer,” friends gleefully share their innocent yearnings, confusion, and wonderment at the power of sexual drive. In “Cavern” a married couple begin to see a star-filled black hole above their bed that grows larger as they become increasingly estranged. In the title story, four girlfriends grow up, drift apart, and pine for each other in isolated silence, until one of them is murdered. Just Pervs is Jess Taylor's second collection of short stories.

JESS TAYLOR is a Toronto writer and poet. She founded The Emerging Writers Reading Series in 2012. Pauls, her first collection of stories, was published by BookThug in 2015. The title story from the collection, “Paul,” received the 2013 Gold Fiction National Magazine Award. Jess has also released two chapbooks of poetry, And Then Everyone: Poems of the West End (Picture Window Press, 2014) and Never Stop (Anstruther Press, 2014). Jess is currently at work on a novel and continuation of her life poem, Never Stop. She lives in Toronto.