When Canadian writers turn to the subject of sex, they tend to become a tad prudish. Perhaps a vestige of colonial uptightness is to blame. Perhaps it’s our inherent politesse. Whatever the cause, sex in Canadian fiction is typically a soft-focus, gauzy affair that traffics in the spiritual union of two recondite souls connecting on an ethereal plane of attraction.

Eva Moran writes the other kind of sex. The sweaty, grinding, carnal kind that involves an entirely different sort of coming together. The stories in Moran’s debut collection are filthy. They involve every manner of sex act imaginable, a veritable tsunami of bodily secretions, and language raw enough to make Larry Flynt blush. They are also very, very funny.

Granted, Moran’s particular brand of rough humour may not be to everyone’s taste. The first sentence of her story “I Am America (And So Can You!): A Book Review” reads, “Fuck me senseless Stephen Colbert.” And that’s one of the more demure imperatives in the book. Moran is not averse to employing lewd double entendres (in “How to Date a Lawn Bowler,” she admonishes: “Should you hear a phrase such as, ‘My vice has a yard on and is holding the shot bowl for the final hammer,’ it is not what you think”), but her preferred method is aggressively straightforward, leaving nothing to the imagination.

Stylistically, Moran has a penchant for the playfully postmodern: stories take the form of quizzes to determine whether you are dating a man who is ready for middle-class marriage, or whether a genius is in love with you. Other stories are cast as self-help manuals, counselling how to date a writer (basic advice: “Don’t!”), or a gay man, or an opera mezzo. She delights in taking traditional chick-lit tropes and turning them on their heads, then adding a measure of good-natured smut to the mix. The outcome is akin to what might have resulted if David Foster Wallace and Xaviera Hollander had collaborated on Bridget Jones’s Diary.

The writing in Porny Stories is conversational and occasionally clunky (“Oh god. Seamen semen!”), and the distressing number of typos throughout the book is distracting. But these are minor complaints. Overall, Moran’s stories are vibrant, bracing, and – if you’re up for them – deliciously entertaining. Her fiction is shot through with a quality that is fabulously rare in Canadian writing about sex: joy.