Kiss Me Someone: Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Best Book of Fall at The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, BUST, and more
"Dark yet sensitive explorations of family and love—of all kinds—from a masterful writer. The women at the centers of these stories are sharp-edged and complicated and irresistible; you won’t be able to look away." —Celeste Ng
Bold and unapologetic, Karen Shepard’s Kiss Me Someone is inhabited by women who walk the line between various states: adolescence and adulthood, stability and uncertainty, selfishness and compassion. They navigate the obstacles that come with mixed-race identity and instabilities in social class, and they use their liminal positions to leverage power. They employ rage and tenderness and logic and sex, but for all of their rationality they're drawn to self-destructive behavior. Shepard’s stories explore what we do to lessen our burdens of sadness and isolation; her characters, fiercely true to themselves, are caught between their desire to move beyond their isolation and a fear that it’s exactly where they belong.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This concise, disturbing collection by Shepard (The Celestials) covers several decades of the author's work, often focusing on troubling experiences of women in the northeastern United States. Many of the protagonists are seen as "exotic" because of their races (as in "Don't Know Where, Don't Know When") and are ambivalent about their backgrounds. Most of the stories, with their slow-burning openings, rely more on telling detail than on plot. "Jerks" is a litany by the narrator of nasty men whose sexual advances she has accepted. "Girls Only" zooms in on a group of cynical bridesmaids, who, it's gradually revealed, once allowed the bride to be sexually assaulted without helping her. Two stories are told in the collective voice in "Popular Girls," it's a group of New York private school 10th-graders, and in "The Mothers" it's a passel of suburban moms of high school basketball players while other stories are from the points of view of the outsiders these hive minds cast out. The final, wrenching story, "Rescue," about an accidental death and a dog, widens the world of a brief story out to include an entire community, and is as compassionate as it is horrifying. This is a sharp and memorable collection.
