Young adults bumble through a variety of often lovely, sometimes awful, regularly awkward sexual firsts--with themselves, with others--in this much-needed collection of boldly honest short stories.
First Times: Short Stories About Sex features nine works of fiction by nine authors (edited by Canadian Karine Glorieux and translated from French by Shelley Tanaka) regarding "first times." The key message is that it is not likely to look, sound, smell, or feel anything like sex in the movies or on the Internet. The reality might smell, as Nicholas Michon writes in "This Ain't Your Grandpa's Pipe," more like "Doritos and chlorine"; sound like embarrassed laughter; or feel uncomfortable and sweaty. Or it can be even better than imagined, though, again, nothing like the movies. As one would-be first-timer says in "My First Time" by Laurence Beaudoin-Masse, "I was assailed with textures, impressions, substances like so many micro-invasions."
The bright, intimate tales are packed with all the massively complicated feelings people can have about sexuality: delight, shame, humor, confusion, frustration, deception, and bliss. The writing is invariably sex positive: "Why do I consider my first kiss to be my 'first time'?... My first kiss was the first time I realized that sexual desire had to be at play--on both sides of that kiss" (Jérémie Larouche, "Rolling a One"). More than anything, the stories offer a wide range of normal experiences, even as the protagonists ask, over and over: Is this normal? Am I normal? The answer, again and again in this marvelous collection, is yes. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor