Just Pervs

by Jess Taylor

A 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Bisexual Fiction

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.

Genres: Short Stories, Canada, Fiction, Contemporary, Audiobook, Queer Lit, Queer

209 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2019

About the author

Jess Taylor is a Toronto writer and poet. Her second collection, Just Pervs, will be released by Book*hug in Canada in Fall 2019. Recently, a short story from that collection, "Two Sex Addicts Fall in Love", was long-listed for The Journey Prize and included in The Journey Prize Anthology 30. The title story from her first collection, Pauls (BookThug, 2015), "Paul," received the 2013 Gold Fiction National Magazine Award. Jess believes that collaboration and helping other writers is an important part of her writing practice and continues to organize events in the community. She is currently working on a novel, Play, and a continuation of her life poem, Never Stop.

Reviews

[Barbara Sumner · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s about sex. From the pov of women. Lots of sex in an infinite variety of ways and means. Very hip writing. Short stories. I’m beginning to think short stories are best for this year, at least for the pleasure of reading. My mind is so taken up with witches and demons. Like the fumes that fill the vagina of the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi and gave her insight and visions, I have nothing left for old fashioned, very long-form literature.
My favourite story in the collection is Two Sex Addicts Fall in Love. It’s all about how they fantasize about tenderness. I read it twice. Just beautiful.

[Brad Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kind of love stories that are about sex, but are not erotic or even romantic. I think I enjoy sex the most from an anthropological/sociological/psychological standpoint. I picked this up kind of at random and I was pleasantly surprised with how much I liked it. Lots of short, acerbic stories about relationships, and bodies, and bodies engaged in relationships. For fans of You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories by Kristen Roupenian, and Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting, but definitely more grounded in reality than either of those books. I'm excited to read more from this author.

The Stink ⭐⭐⭐⭐
There's No More Happiness Left ⭐⭐⭐
Winter Banger ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Puberty Drawer ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Bites ⭐⭐⭐
Just Pervs ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Camera ⭐⭐
Two Sex Addicts Fall in Love ⭐⭐⭐
Tight 'n' Bright (The Lowest Point of My Life) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A Prayer to the IUD ⭐⭐⭐
Cavern ⭐⭐
A Story About Our Friends Lana and Tia ⭐⭐⭐
I Moved Out When I Caught Him With the Dog ⭐⭐⭐⭐
So Raw You Can't Sit ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Olives ⭐⭐⭐⭐

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read it on recommendation from our eLibrary. I enjoyed these stories, and despite some reviews here that felt they were overly sexualized, I felt that most of the stories were trying to be in depth looks at relationships and sexuality. If anything, I felt the stories were too short - like they were just setting the stage for a wider, more interesting story that might have gone places. They left me wanting more - not more of the same kinds of stories, but more detail, depth, and development.

[Mallory Pearson · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. the title really gives away the vibe of this book in the best way. overall, i found the stories contained in it super enjoyable! they're dark and gross and times and leave you with an uncomfortable feeling. i appreciated that--i always love when a book can almost give me enough secondhand embarrassment to put it down. i did expect the queer points of the story to be more present than they were, though i enjoyed the overall mentions of bisexuality. i think this is a fun read, great for people who read Kink and liked it.

thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with an ARC!

[Jessica Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read my review, visit: http://rabble.ca/news/2019/09/power-a...

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really took my time with this as it was THAT good I truly did not want it to end.

Seriously one of the best collections I have ever read!

[Enid Wray · Rating 1 out of 5]

Posting on this is overdue...

And another one which I bailed on... Perhaps this is an 'age related' issue this time around... The feminist in me really wanted to enjoy luxuriating in these stories... but the ones I struggled through reading just fell flat for me... and I couldn't bring myself to keep reading.

I have peaked at the review at Quill & Quire after the fact... and it does say that there is an unevenness to the collection. I guess I just didn't find the right stories to resonate with me. If I had more time I might try to cherry pick through to find the gems in the collection... but that will have to wait for another future time.

For now, I'm moving on...

[Shelby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“When I was young, I looked deeply into my desire, and a trap door gave out that led me into a pit of deviant sexual hunger.”

[Katrina Peed · Rating 3 out of 5]

What was I expecting from a book called "Just Pervs?"

honestly an awesome little weirdo, just slightly off brand of my personal line of weirdo.

[Ariel [She Wants the Diction] · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is just a bunch of uncomfortable vignettes from the author's life thinly disguised as a book of short stories. Far from "championing expressions of female sexuality in their many forms," this book focuses on a singular type of experience: the author's.

I came to the conclusion that she was just writing her own life by the way she reuses names and characters - Sam, Travis, and others pop up multiple times in different stories, always in the same roles. (Side note: I have never read so many generic white person names in my life. I literally couldn't keep any of the characters straight because of it - also probably because they had no characterization or anything substantial to differentiate them. 🙃)

"But," you say, "she could just be writing a character!" I find this highly unlikely seeing as every single story, despite supposedly having a different narrator, had the exact same tone of "I'm a straight girl who's bicurious but has never actually had a sexual encounter with a woman." Like, here's an example of her writing:

She starts to think about the man from the movie, the full-frontal scene. She thinks about the men in spin class. She thinks about a woman with a tight purple sweater who smiled at her in Zehrs on the weekend. She starts to get wet.

ANUTHA ONE:

I laughed and shrugged. In my mind, almost everyone was bisexual anyway. I certainly was.

Elsewhere in the book, she says she's pansexual, and while I'm not disputing her right to her identity, and to identify as pan even if she's only been with men, I wonder why this book chooses to focus on all the bad straight sex she's having rather than explore the undercurrent of homoerotic attraction. It feels like she's prioritizing a "straight white woman" approach to sex that is literally E V E R Y W H E R E already, which leaves me wondering... Why do we need another of these books? Especially one that isn't even sexy?!?!?

See: the detailed description of how she used to masturbate as a child using the nose of a stuffed animal until she bled... somehow??? And then continued to masturbate even when her sister walked into the room. ("The Puberty Drawer") Or, consider this gem of a line:

She imagines their bodies are two halves of a worm wanting to be reattached.

Hot, right?

I just want to be clear, I'm not invalidating straight white women's sexual desires here. The fact that I personally found this book unsexy and boring wouldn't even be a problem if it hadn't been billed as "championing expressions of female sexuality in their many forms." With a bold claim like that, I honestly expected it to be about more than just Brad's dick.

Like I get it, discussing female masturbation is still something of a taboo, so yay feminism or whatever, but the way in which she does it is just so cringy and gross... like she's purposely trying to overshare and make us squirm in our seats rather than actually illuminate any deeper truths about women's desires. It feels very self-indulgent to only write her own experiences, and I truly don't think she understands how mundane her experiences actually are.

The "freakiest" thing in this book, for example, is a vague discussion of a strap-on - and I say vague because it never actually gets used. Even when she weakly tries to fictionalize it, there's nothing interesting about getting wasted and fucking someone you shouldn't have. ("Tight'n'Bright") We've literally all done that.

As for the writing itself, it's rudimentary. Sure it's occasionally relatable, but the "truths" are so commonplace and obvious as to be forgettable. There's barely any sex, and when there is, it's boring, straight, un-sexy sex that's described in an unappealing way and never goes anywhere interesting (like, say, two women). It feels disingenuous and almost malicious that she flirts with the same sex the entire book but never actually explores that attraction.

There's also way too much focus on dream imagery. Newflash: no one cares what your characters are dreaming about. That's not an engaging way to further a narrative. Overall I'm left going, "WHYYYY?!?!"

Stories with potential: Camera, Winter Banger, and The Puberty Drawer.

[Sarah O'Riordan | travelseatsreads · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really don't like rating books so low as it's someone's work but I really cannot find a positive within this one.

Marketed as a frank, contemporary book of stories which looks at the views of female sexuality and their desires, this reads as a dull, inhibited, forced and lazy teenage diary. Often with a collection of stories there are one or two which stand out more than others, in this case none stood out in a positive manner. The only chapter that anyway jumped out was the token chapter on beastiality which honestly just felt like it was put in there for the shock factor.

I listened to the audio and couldn't be positive about this either, unfortunately the narrator sounded like she was trying to read a mix of Fifty Shades and Mills & Boon.

[Hannah Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories in Just Pervs by Jess Taylor are tender and complex—these characters are a little lonesome, but there's also a layer of funny that just doesn't quit.

[Juniper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just Pervs is a collection of short stories brought to us by Jess Taylor, who gave readers The critically acclaimed Pauls back in 2015. Through her characters we see an examination of female sexuality and the subversion of its contemporary views. Their points of view take the romanticism out of things like sex and take it from something holy and sacred to being what it really is: human. Sex isn’t always meant to be a big deal, but rather it can be so many things at once.

The stories have little in common with one another except that the main characters all experience or witness something sexual in nature. That sounds like a cop out but I promise it isn’t. The stories show the reader various points of view and what was interesting to me was that many of the women depicted never exhibited shame in their behavior. Female sexuality should be spoken about more.

I think I might’ve shot myself in the foot by listening to the audiobook rather than reading the ebook. It was difficult for me to differentiate between the stories because I couldn’t clearly tell when one ended and the next began. I could only do it a few times.

[Alison Gadsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, wow, wow! This was my absolute favourite summer read! A collection of stories that will turn you on, make you squirm and allow you to dream of how sexy a life can be! I read this book in one afternoon on a dock in the hot sun!

This collection is so bold, but really nothing happens in the collection that many of us don’t think about, live or even imagine writing about or living. So, while sex runs through the novel, the characters are more complicated than their desires and obsessions, their perversions.

There are characters that are threaded through the novel, so while I was reading, I found myself comforted by their reappearance.

Strongly recommend you buy this book for anyone!!

[Chyx Xyng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just Pervs is a short story collection with ten stand-alone stories, but many share recurring characters. Read together, the short stories provide a larger picture of a group of friends/acquaintances navigating loneliness, sex, and love. I enjoy the ‘voice’ in this book. Jess Taylor’s simple sentences often deliver profound thoughts: “… maybe there was a version of ourselves that was realer than all the others and the best of us was still out there for us to discover,” that she then shoots down with humour: “There wasn’t another me out there, and if there was, it was even worse than this one.”

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this all in one sitting, so 1.) it's certainly readable and 2.) I might be biased from sleep deprivation, but the first half of the book's stories felt underdeveloped and amateurish, while the second half (the epionymous 'Just Pervs' and everything after) felt far more interesting and thoughtful. Overall, the writing style is quite clumsy and the stories aren't as developed as they could be. That said, some of the topics are interesting, and there are some worthwhile insights if you're looking for another honest and raw woman writing about the trauma and mess and complexity of sex.

[Eliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This read was really different for me and I loved that the stories are taken from a women's POV and their infatuation with sex and their lives. It's multiple stories about sex addicts that fall in love and each story is different.

I just didn't really enjoy the writing or the lack of descriptions of the characters and their journeys. I did love the whole aspect of sex from the POV of women, but it lacked fire for me.

Thank you, NetGalley for the ARC.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a messy short story collection about women and their relationship to knocking boots without romance or eroticism, just a questionable exploration into being obsessed with sex as a woman. Some stories broke my heart, others made me laugh, and others made me want to slap some sense into them, either way, this was all consuming for me, once I started it, I had to finish it.

[Brooke Bitzan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5☆

It is really refreshing to read about sex in a way that isn't erotica. Overall, this book is a very interesting exploration of female sexuality. I think I would have liked to read it physically rather than via audiobook. I might buy it despite being a 3 star so I can do just that.

[icedcashewmilklatte · Rating 3 out of 5]

i thought it was quite thought provoking, bringing up prevalent topics surrounding not just the complexities of life but sex and relationships in general.

[Josh PeterSmith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m sorry that you saw that I read this—but I swear someone told me to.

[Whitney · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was already iffy, but the animal story was too far.

[Michaela Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took my time with this short story collection, as I felt like I needed to sit with each short story. I loved the blend of humour, heartbreak, and sexiness. This book is beautifully vulgar.

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re a fan of Weird Girl Books, JUST PERVS is the perfect read for you. Furthermore, if you’re a fan of carrying books with stare-worthy titles shown on the covers in public, JUST PERVS is the perfect read for you, too. Though, writing this review and spending too long on the head-turning cover art and title would be doing this book a major injustice, as the stories inside are equally subversive and thought-provoking. Music reviewers sometimes refer to an album as having “no skips” when every song is a jam; I believe JUST PERVS has “no skips” for a similar reason.

Each, individual story in JUST PERVS immediately grabbed my attention within their first page and kept that attention the entire way through. One of my favorite parts about this collection is the lengths each piece goes to queer sexuality (“queer” being a verb here), a description that I know may sound redundant. Truly, though, JUST PERVS takes subverting themes of sex & intimacy and pushes them all the way outside of the box. In fact, I’d say there’s actually no box when it comes to Jess Taylor’s mind. Yes, the results of this are shocking and sometimes disturbing, but I like sitting in that discomfort for a bit.

I realize I’m not going into specifics about the pieces in JUST PERVS, but I think spoiling their storylines would take away from their fun. I loved starting a new story within the collection and having no idea (but desperately awaiting to learn) what strange, freaky, queer events would be described in the following pages. I gasped, I laughed, and I definitely had looks of concern on my face while reading JUST PERVS in a coffee shop. I loved jUST PERVS and I greatly look forward to reading more of Jess Taylor’s work in the future!

[malaika bunziboo]

* 2 and a half stars

[Katlynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a little known, Canadian published book that I found on a random persons goodreads a while back. Turns out, it’s one of my favorite books of the year. Short stories that weave a timeline together of two friends, one bisexual and one straight, as well as stories about strangers, sex addicts, and random sexual encounters. I loved these stories with my whole heart and highly recommend. These ones have stuck with me for a while now.

“The play stars the four of us as the animals I know we are. Penny fucks my first love in the music practice rooms. She’s the one who knows all about anal before I even got my hands on a penis. Dani sneaks into the bathroom and watches people pee through the stalls, guy or girl, it doesn’t matter. Jenade keeps a USB strung around her neck with porn based on her favorite fantasy movies and a video on how to deep throat.”