The Kissing List
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A short-story collection about women who defy expectations and take outrageous chances in the face of a life that might turn out to be anything less than extraordinary.
After spending a post-college year abroad at Oxford, where she found herself having dinner with famous poets and kissing all the wrong people, Sylvie moves to New York City to begin a life that is full of possibility. Her choices seem endless: from new jobs to new friends to new kissing partners, her future is hers to create. But what she doesn’t realize is that each exciting life that she envisions for herself is inevitably shadowed with potential disappointment: the stultifying temp job, the disastrous first date, the surprising and heart-breaking loss of friends, lovers, and roommates. In a modern world that is increasingly unforgiving, Sylvie and the friends she meets along the way test the boundaries of how far they will go to carve out unique and brilliant adult lives for themselves.
Written in exuberant, imaginative, and sardonically funny prose, these interlocking stories take place in a fictional universe where sex is casually exchanged for a designer dress, a vacation home is surrendered to mice in the hope of saving a relationship, a jealous argument leads to a life-threatening game, and a headless woman gives an impatient speech on the many varieties of tears. Shot through with laugh-out-loud lines, yet still wrenchingly emotional and resonant, The Kissing List is a book about women who bravely defy expectations and take outrageous chances in the face of living a life that might turn out to be anything less than extraordinary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reents's collection is formally adept one story in which a woman trades sex for designer clothes moves seamlessly into another that begins with an ill-fitting and outdated suit worn to a temp job. Despite the pleasing transitions, however, the entire volume is infused with a melancholic wistfulness that can come off as self-indulgent, and the weakest stories tend to be shallow and predictable. The stories form a patchwork of the lives of friends and acquaintances in New York, told from different perspectives, which flesh out significant events such as Laurie's cancer, or the ever-changing landscape of Sylvia's love life. Reents uses the myriad viewpoints and freedom of the short format to play with different styles and forms, but the whole is cohesive. "Roommates," for example, is a traditional, realist narrative, but Reents experiments with surrealism ("Disquisition on Tears") and a detached, third-person narrative that reinforces the notion of a diaspora of the self ("Love for Women"). If not exactly trailblazing, Reents has created a collection that is emotionally vivid and stylistically interesting.
