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The Kissing List
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Random House Publishing Group 2012
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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.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
05/22/2012
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780307951847
ASIN:
B006JHKSZ0
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Stephanie Reents. (2012). The Kissing List. Random House Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Stephanie Reents. 2012. The Kissing List. Random House Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Stephanie Reents, The Kissing List. Random House Publishing Group, 2012.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Stephanie Reents. The Kissing List. Random House Publishing Group, 2012.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Jun 12, 2018 15:09:20
Date Updated:
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      • fileAs: Reents, Stephanie
      • bioText: STEPHANIE REENTS's fiction has been included in the O. Henry Prize Stories,
        noted in Best American Short Stories, and has appeared in numerous journals.
        Stephanie has been a Bread Loaf Conference Scholar, a Stegner Fellow, and a
        Rhodes Scholar. She is an assistant professor at the College of the Holy Cross in
        Worcester, Massachusetts.
      • name: Stephanie Reents
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publishDate
2012-05-22T00:00:00-04:00
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title
The Kissing List
fullDescription
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.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: The New York Times Book Review
      • content: "Reents's characters are as sharp as they are sly, as intellectually brilliant as they are oddball. These stories are often funny, but there's a satisfying dark edge....Reents weaves the book's stories together with humor, grief and slender prose."
      • premium: False
      • source: The New Yorker
      • content: "Imaginative and skillfully written."
      • premium: False
      • source: San Francisco Chronicle
      • content: "Filled with funny observations and sharp insights....cleverness is the defining virtue of this collection....Think Lena Dunham's Girls."
      • premium: False
      • source: New York Daily News
      • content: "Funny and fresh."
      • premium: False
      • source: Grantland.com
      • content: "A hysterical collection of stories about sex and relationships that touch on things that are actually dark and miserable....The short-story collection Lena Dunham might write."
      • premium: False
      • source: San Francisco Examiner
      • content: "Reents' stories are witty and packed with sharp, irreverent dialogue. With rhythm and verve unusual in most story collections, conversations in 'The Kissing List' turn into flesh and blood."
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus
      • content: "Reents impresses with her knowledge of conflicted young-adult hearts and her astute portrait of their social lives....Sharp work from a promising writer."
      • premium: False
      • source: Booklist
      • content: "This invigorating debut collection follows a group of young women searching for fulfillment in life and love....Reents's witty narratives highlight the nuances of her characters' desires and hesitations."
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly
      • content: "Formally adept...Reents has created a collection that is emotionally vivid and stylistically interesting."
      • premium: False
      • source: Lauren Groff, author of the New York Times Bestseller The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia
      • content: "The stories in The Kissing List are alternately ferocious, light-footed, sharp, and mordant; Stephanie Reents, in her first collection, proves herself to be a writer of terrific grace and power."
      • premium: False
      • source: Anthony Doerr, author of Memory Wall and About Grace
      • content: "The Kissing List is a relevant, daring, and beautifully-written book. The writing is breathless and tricksy, and at the heart of each story lies a radiant desperation. There are dashes of Amy Hempel in here, and Aimee Bender, too, but ultimately the book comes out of a sensibility all Reents' own."
      • premium: False
      • source: Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries
      • content: "Stephanie Reents' stories are lucid, exciting, and unlike anything I've read before."
      • premium: False
      • source: Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Oth
      • content: "Stephanie Reents' The Kissing List is that rare phenomenon, a book that does justice to the complexity and ambivalence and hilarity of human relationships. This is a book about the mortality and mutability of everything that matters: romance, female friendship, ideals, and the self. Through the sheer force of its wit and insight and fearlessness, it is also a book about the things that never die. A moving and razor-sharp debut."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        February 27, 2012
        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. Agent: Emily Forland, the Wendy Weil Agency.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        March 15, 2012
        Debut collection of loosely connected stories follows a group of highly educated, often underachieving women through their 20s. "Kissing" introduces us to most of the continuing characters through the eyes of Sylvie while she is a graduate student at Oxford. She sketches a tangled web of flirtations, sexual relations and betrayals among various expat Americans that continues back in the States, where unsettled, disconnected maneuverings are the norm for young people unsure of who they really are. We don't much like Sylvie at the end of the next story, "Roommates," when she moves out of the Manhattan apartment she shares with cancer-stricken Laurie; her oddly noncommittal relationship with Lance, a considerably older doctor from her Western hometown, is off-putting as well. Reluctance to engage is a temptation for much of this collection, which examines marrying for money ("Love for Women"), drifting in and out of jobs ("Temporary") and weird sex ("Little Porn Story") as strategies these smart, anxious women use to delay figuring out what they really want from life. But everyone grows up, whether they like it or not. The strongest stories, "Games" and "Awesome," plumb Sylvie's insecurities and show her learning to be more accepting, less concerned with the impression she makes. The weakest, Laurie's delusional, cancer-stoked reverie in "Disquisition on Tears," strays too far from the plain, realistic plot and character development that is Reents' forte. Gratuitously baroque developments in a few tales also suggest an author still not entirely clear about the essential nature of her talent. On the whole, however, Reents impresses with her knowledge of conflicted young-adult hearts and her astute portrait of their social lives during the years in which the graduates of fancy colleges haven't yet figured out who will make it big and who will merely get along. Sharp work from a promising writer who might do even better with the broader scale of a novel.

        COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        March 15, 2012

        Don't be fooled by the cover--this is not the first chick-lit novel from the author of Last Will and Testament: My Frozen Eggs, but a complicated series of interlocking short stories. The main characters are all college-educated women, but each story has its own voice and tone. In a collection whose strength lies in its dark humor--Reents has a flair for difficult situations--the title piece is the weakest and the fluffiest. "Roommates," however, is an unsettling, unsentimental look at a cancer victim seen through the eyes of her roommate and her wig's Styrofoam head. "This Is Just To Say" is about the friend who doesn't make it into your memoirs. Readers may want to dismiss "The Memo" as another trendy entrant in the workplace genre, but like Jennifer Egan's PowerPoint story from A Visit from the Goon Squad, it succeeds on storytelling power. VERDICT Not all of these stories work--"Disquisition on Tears" doesn't come together, for instance--but overall this is recommended for readers of contemporary short fiction. "The Memo" alone is worth a trip to the library.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. of Maryland, St. Mary's City

        Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        April 1, 2012
        This invigorating debut collection follows a group of young women searching for fulfillment in life and love. The more notable of the loosely interlinked stories follow the relationships of flighty, headstrong Sylvie, from her life as an Oxford graduate student kissing nearly anyone in sight to a relationship-weary New Yorker. In the tender Roommates, Sylvie shares an apartment with friend-of-a-friend Laurie, who is battling cancer. As Sylvie's relationship with an older doctor becomes muddled, Laurie's relationship with an ex-boyfriend completely dissolves, forcing the two women to acknowledge their unsettled desires. Games finds 28-year-old Sylvie fraught with jealousy on a vacation during which her boyfriend's affections waver. Other standouts include Animal Cruelty, in which a young woman escapes to her family's remote cabin to mull over her unplanned pregnancy. As the cabin becomes increasingly overrun with mice, her struggle to come to terms with her situation grows frenetic. The dreamlike Disquisition of Tears follows a house visit of a headless woman. Reents' witty narratives highlight the nuances of her characters' desires and hesitations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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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.
...
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