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Don't Kiss Me: Stories, by Lindsay Hunter
Free PDF Don't Kiss Me: Stories, by Lindsay Hunter
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An explosive story collection from a bold, blistering new voice
With broken language, deep vernacular, unexpectedly fierce empathy, and a pace that'll break your granny's neck, Lindsay Hunter lures, cajoles, and wrenches readers into the wild world of Don't Kiss Me.
Here you'll meet Peggy Paula, who works the late shift at Perkin's and envies the popular girls who come in to eat french fries and brag about how far they let the boys get with them. You'll meet a woman in her mid-thirties pining for her mean-spirited, abusive boyfriend, Del, a nine-year-old who is in no way her actual boyfriend. And just try to resist the noir story of a reluctant, Afrin-addled detective.
Self-loathing, self-loving, and otherwise trapped by their own dumb selves, these characters make one cringe-worthy mistake after another. But for each bone-headed move, Hunter delivers a surprising moment that chokes you up as you peer into what seemed like deep emptiness and discover a profound longing for human understanding. It's the collision of these moments that make this a powerful, alive book.
The stories of Don't Kiss Me are united by Hunter's singular voice and unflinching eye. By turns crass and tender, heartbreaking and devastatingly funny, her stories expose a world full of characters seemingly driven by desperation, but in the end, they're the ones who get the last laugh. Hunter is at the forefront of the boldest, most provocative writers working now.
- Sales Rank: #1060146 in Books
- Brand: Brand: FSG Originals
- Published on: 2013-07-02
- Released on: 2013-07-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.51" h x .52" w x 5.11" l, .30 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 192 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
Hunter’s (Daddy’s, 2010) sophomore collection depicts oversexed underachievers barely afloat in a sea of violence, abuse, and confusion. Yet these 26 stories, deeply internalized in neurotic lyricism, are hilarious and fully realized portraits of the disavowed. Sidelined during a high-school dance, a group of girls recalls exploring each other’s bodies in the locker room. A grown woman studies relationship magazines to help decode her complicated nine-year-old boyfriend. A retired Richard Nixon, lamenting his wife’s aging body, flirts with an admirer while sipping Scotch on the beach and dreaming of Jackie Kennedy. A lonely spinster nurtures stray cats until she receives a visit not from her Indonesian crush but from Animal Control. A band of misfits living in a roaming RV survives on road kill and stolen goods. And in the uproarious title story, a woman obsesses over a female coworker she envies and despises. Miranda July and George Saunders come to mind, but Hunter’s crass yet tender characters are unprecedented, relating fart jokes and impossible sentiment in stylized prose that mirrors their threadbare souls and ineffectual optimism. --Jonathan Fullmer
Review
“Mesmerizing . . . visceral . . . exquisite. Hunter's portraits are heartbreaking. She cares about characters we don't want to think about, issues we would rather not face. These are not lovable characters; they make you sad and sometimes sick. But Hunter wants to know: Who are these girls inside? She doesn't shy from speaking their truths. And reading these stories? They kind of make you feel like your heart could kick the windows out.” ―Hope Reese, Chicago Tribune
“Hunter's stories feel incredibly urgent. Hunter is such a talented writer that she makes the unimaginably unpleasant seem natural, and terrifyingly so . . . Those who've read Hunter's excellent debut, Daddy's, won't be surprised by her feats. If that collection announced a formidable and refreshing prose stylist, Don't Kiss Me cements that reputation.” ―Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe
“The cover alone is great, but what's inside will make you laugh and scream and cringe and cry--in the best of ways, of course.” ―Jen Doll, "25 Books to Beach-Read This Summer," New York Magazine
“Hunter is remarkably talented at taking sentences and twining them around the brain, creating a beautiful pattern out of ugliness . . . use[ing] language as a tool to excavate our entrenched humanity.” ―Michele Filgate, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Hunter's magical prose is the sort of thing that might happen if George Saunders and Gertrude Stein co-edited Raymond Carver. The stories vary wildly in pace and procedure, but each has its own visceral language that goes straight to the gut.” ―Ashley Baker, Nylon
“The collection creates a genuine sense of discomfort, forcing us to contemplate the presence of beauty in the ugliest of phenomena.” ―Angela Sundstrom, Time Out New York
“Don't Kiss Me, Hunter's second short story collection, is a bold, haunting, and beautiful observation of lives lived outside the scope of the mainstream . . . Hunter near-effortlessly captures the hopes, fears, realizations, regrets, and desires of the uglier, more taboo, and misunderstood side of humanity. Though their worlds may be sordid, Hunter manages to infuse her misfits with incredible amounts of empathy and humor. Instead of repulsed, we often find ourselves rooting from the sidelines. And it's hard not to voraciously ingest all 26 stories in Don't Kiss Me, given their breakneck pace, raw emotion, and Hunter's own propensity for language that pops but never fizzles . . . [Don't Kiss Me] is transgressive without being navel-gazing, confrontational without being aggressive. But above all, it contains a whole lot of Hunter's bloody, beating heart.” ―Rebecca Rubenstein, Kirkus
“These 26 stories, deeply internalized in neurotic lyricism, are hilarious and fully realized portraits of the disavowed . . . And in the uproarious title story, a woman obsesses over a female coworker she envies and despises. Miranda July and George Saunders come to mind, but Hunter's crass yet tender characters are unprecedented, relating fart jokes and impossible sentiment in stylized prose that mirrors their threadbare souls and ineffectual optimism.” ―Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist
“Overall these stories land with a wet slap--messy and confrontational. They demand your horrified attention, and they reward it with exaggerated and irresistible humanity.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Lindsay Hunter is electrifying at the word level, sentence level, line level, idea level. Say hello to your new favorite.” ―Amelia Gray, author of THREATS
“Lindsay Hunter may be the most daring writer of any generation. Like animals on an undiscovered island, her stories are never-before-seen species to be gazed at with wonder, reverence, and no small amount of terror. In this collection of brilliant, deviant innovations, Hunter's scorching comical voice will hold you tightly with a raunchy tenderness as you laugh and cry together through every imaginable apocalypse. Prepare to have your eyebrows singed, to get insanely high off the otherworldly fumes of its grotesque and unstoppable perfection.” ―Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa
“Lindsay Hunter's prose should be part of a survival kit--her stories will start a fire and burn you. They're heated, sardonic, fearless, and to the point. She mixes dark humor with everyday life, reminding me of writers like Amy Hempel, Maggie Estep, and A. M. Homes. Regardless of what she writes next, be it a book of poetry, a novel, or sentences carved on a gas station's bathroom stall or scribbled on a tavern's soggy napkin, I wanna be the first one to read it.” ―Frank Bill, author of Donnybrook
“Lindsay Hunter is one hell of a writer who takes risks and leaves it all on the page in the very best ways. She makes the ugly beautiful and the raw elegant. Don't Kiss Me, tell truths with a fierce, percussive voice that is not only wholly original but so powerful, it steals into your body, your bones.” ―Roxane Gay, author of Ayiti
About the Author
Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collection Daddy's. She lives in Chicago, where she is the cofounder and cohost of the flash-fiction reading series Quickies!.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Not for me, but I'm glad it was published
By P. Mann
The late mystery writer William Tapply wrote an article called "Invisible Writing," the primary point of which is that writing should generally not call attention to itself. In "Don't Kiss Me," Lindsay Hunter thoroughly disregards that advice. The first thing I noticed was the writing style, which is gleefully ungrammatical and often somewhat dense. The third sentence of the first story, for example, is really just a long comma splice that runs on for well over 200 words. Other stories are entirely in capital letters with little or no punctuation. Throughout, grammatical rules are not just broken but shattered. Subject-verb disagreement is common, objective pronouns are used as subjects, and the list continues.
Again, I realize that the author is mostly in control of her language here. There's too much evidence of intent. But the welter of words or the flurry of capital letters made reading the stories more difficult. Still, I read them all, and there were a few I liked. (I should have liked them more had they been written in something closer to standard written English, I confess.)
Among the more notable stories:
"Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula": This is the first story and is told in a series of three vignettes. Peggy Paula emerges as a sad, lonely character, one who desperately longs for inclusion and tends to associate it with sex.
"My Boyfriend Del" is about an adult woman who seems unhealthily obsessed with a nine-year-old boy. Told from the woman's point of view, the story presents her as a seriously damaged woman, someone who seems to have the sensibilities of a child. How she remains in the boy's life is not at all clear, though, and I thought the failure to explain how a mother could let her nine-year-old son spend so much time with an adult woman was a hole in the story that prevented it from being as successful as the author presumably wanted.
"Nixon in Retirement" is about Richard Nixon--in particular his sexual desires. Unfortunately, aside from the names, I saw little that reflected Nixon as I understood him. (This is not to say that I'm an expert in all things Nixon.)
"After" is an exercise in scatology, cannibalism, and sexual references, all taking place after an apocalypse. This three-page story is at times amusing and usually over-the-top. It also contains no sentence-final punctuation, for whatever that fact is worth.
If it seems as if I am obsessing about the grammar, I would suggest that the author, by choosing the styles she did, invites such close attention. And I did pay close attention. Was the absence of sentence-final punctuation in "After" intended to be ironic, a commentary on the fact that the apocalypse has happened but the characters in the story somehow survived? Is the absence of lower-case letters in two of the stories intended to reflect something--shouting perhaps? When a quotation is offset on only one side by a comma, should I understand this choice to mean something? I found myself unable to answer these questions and thus unable to appreciate the stylistic choices.
So "Don't Kiss Me" (the book, not the final story in it) just didn't appeal to me. I present this review only as an explanation why it didn't work for me. Still, I am pleased to see books like this published. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the publishers, have demonstrated a commitment to allowing a diversity of voices to be heard, and though not all of those voices will appeal to an individual reader, I am pleased that they have an outlet.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
unmitigated drivel
By Willie
Oh, where to begin on this stinker? The first clue for me was the 400-word sentence in the first 'story' of this collection of rambling and addled collection of words, seemingly thrown like mud against a wall to see what would 'stick.'
Or perhaps it was the complete lack or abuse of punctuation throughout? The use of all caps? The nonsense dialogue layout?
I understand the concept of 'flash fiction,' but if this work is a superior example then my cat walking across my keyboard is James Joyce.
How this unbelievably poor example of 'modern' prose is touted as fiction, let alone 'flash fiction' is beyond me. Perhaps this 'book' (if you can call it that) may appeal to some of today's youth, but I don't see how any publisher would consider wasting the paper for printing this stuff.
Don't waste a dime on this 'book.'
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Dysfunctional stories of Southern gothic love and loss.
By Richard Thomas
THIS REVIEW ORIGINALLY RAN AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.
Lindsay Hunter owes as much to Denis Johnson as she does to Mary Gaitskill. Her short stories, collected in Don't Kiss Me (FSG Originals) do not hesitate to descend into the primal urges and dark, lusty behaviors that make us all animals at our core, but they also shine a light on the truth, a nugget of goodness at the center of what is quite often a lonely, depraved and tragic journey, one blanketed in a desire to be seen, to be loved--no matter who we are, or what we've done. Hunter's characters work at diners and long to be included, they take care of their children while embracing their shortcomings, they chase boys into cornfields and kiss their best girlfriends, all the while longing to feel special and included.
One of the early stories in this her second short story collection, "Dishes" starts off in typical Lindsay Hunter fashion, setting the stage by showing us the raw recounting of every humble and embarrassing moment--no filter, just a mix of pride and surrender:
"At breakfast my kid practices his ABCs and barfs into his cereal bowl just before Q. My other kid points out how the barf had splashed onto the table in the shape of Oklahoma. I don't tell him it looks more like Texas, he's a little kid and if he wants to mistake Texas for Oklahoma it's no skin off my tit. My husband wipes up the barf and I watch his shorts bunch in his ass."
There is so much going on here. First, it's funny, right? Whether you've been there a million times before, or this whole scene is a window into what parenthood might look like, the casual retelling, the "no skin off my tit," summons up laughter. Later, as a chorus through the story, our protagonist keeps saying, "Big girls gotta eat!" She laughs at the fact that she's overweight, she knows it, and she embraces it. She is who she is. You can almost picture her shrugging her shoulders as she says it. Her son packs her a lunch of nothing but Fruit Roll-Ups, Tootsie Rolls, half of a juice box, and a single Goldfish cracker. It's funny, it's sweet--and it's kind of sad. We go along with the joke, but quite often after the punch line, there is an extended darkness that hangs in the air to remind us that these are people, not jokes--these are real lives, not just there for our amusement. Take the final lines from this same story, "Dishes" and tell me how it feels:
"...a song about a lonely desert wandered starts, I pass tacos pizzas chicken ice cream barbeque. The sky is pink meatblood, is a runny sorbet, the sun is a melting butterscotch, the sky is a dirty plate."
Not so good, I think.
Another story that does a great job of luring us in with soft memories and sweet adolescence is "Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula." This might be my favorite story in the collection, and since it leads off the book, Lindsay Hunter may agree with me. The first thing we learn is that Peggy works in a diner, where she watches the popular kids come in after games and dances, always in the shadows, picking up lost lipsticks, making them her own, transferring the lust and heady glow that the girls have to her own seduction of the red-headed dishwasher weeks later.
The second things we learn is that "Peggy Paula has a kidney-shaped scar on her lower back from falling backward out an open window backward at a disco." She went there to meet men, but it was a gay nightclub, so she didn't have any luck. Tumbling into a dumpster, pissed on by an apologetic blonde boy, this is a memory that she cherishes, even though she was hurt, even robbed by the club goer. The memory she clings to is that he called her special.
The third thing we learn about Peggy Paula is that she is having an affair with a married man who worked at the local video store. Throughout the story we get all of the sweaty moments in back seats, the desperation and grunting, the echo of shut doors as these men use her, and walk away. But what brings the story full circle, what really punches you in the gut are the final lines of the story, after they've been caught, what Lindsay Hunter does best--showing us the truth and motivation that drove Peggy to commit these questionable acts:
"...and maybe that's why she let the man in two nights later, had to see his eyes, had to feel again, and she kept letting the man in, she kept letting the man in, his smell the hair on his chest the delicate skin above his pelvis the muscles in his thighs his calloused hands the shapes of his toes the gold in his eyes the missing molar the mole on his back the heart in his chest the breaths in and out he was alive he was another he was a man and Peggy Paula let him, she let him, because if no one is there to touch you are you even really there?"
If you don't take a deep breath there, and let out a heavy sigh, nodding your head, maybe tearing up a bit, swallowing your judgment, muttering, "Damn," under your breath--then maybe you don't have a heart, just a lump of coal where that pumping, anxious beast should rest.
And the taboo--what about that, the deviant, the sexual, the secrets? That's another part of what makes Lindsay Hunter such a brilliant writer, her willingness to risk everything on the page, to say what we're all thinking, to reveal those moments we'd prefer the world never saw. Here are two quick examples.
The first is from "Plans," where our female lead kisses a teacher, and steals a lipstick, just to see how it feels, to get that rush of adrenaline:
"I wore that lipstick one night when we all met up to swim and it was so dark I let a boy take off my bottoms, the lipstick smeared and greasy all around my mouth and its crayon smell all over the boy, and then I put a ribbon on that lipstick and gave it to Momma for Christmas."
She likes to cross lines, break rules--stealing, kissing teachers, taking off her pants at the lake, the dirty lipstick now a gift to her mother? "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?" you might ask. It seems that she does.
And then there is "Me and Gin." It's a sweet story on the surface, but just under the bruised flesh is a dysfunctional childhood, parents that are damaged and absent, friendships that are anything but healthy. The opening lines:
"Me and Gin play Lips. This a game where you see how long you can touch lips before you need to scream. Gin always the one screaming first, I guess not always, sometimes I scream first cause I don't want to seem like no weird lips lover.
Me and Gin's both girls. See."
And no, I'm not giving you all of the juicy parts in this review, you'll have to pick up the book and read it yourself.
When I think of the rabbits in "Summer Massacre," it immediately reminds me of "Emergency" by the aforementioned Denis Johnson. When I read the slick sex in the back seat of a car in "Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula," I think of the previously cited Mary Gaitskill and the power struggle that is "Romantic Weekend." When I pause to remember "Plans" and the final words of the boy hovering over our girl when she says, "I ain't no bitch like your brother called me," and he answers, as they finish their grunting and heaving, "Ain't you, he said, ain't you?" I'm transported to the heartbreak that is the final scene in "Life Expectancy" by Holly Goddard Jones. But whatever other voices flitter about you as you read Don't Kiss Me, familiar dysfunction, dark roads you've been down before, know that Lindsay Hunter is an original, she is fearless, and she will always be a soothsayer--telling stories with heart, compassion, and authority.
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