Don't Kiss Me

May 13, 2013
The characters in this blazing, lurid collection of flash fiction are grotesqueries: beady-eyed and globular, Cheetos dust on their fingers, hearts either numb or mean. Many of them speak in a similar voice: flat, uneducated, talking in a breathless run-on about the stomach-turning, the tragic, the objectionable—without seeming very impressed by any of it. These pieces offer a brief, searing glimpse into a series of marginal, odd lives: a woman inexplicably in love with a snot-nosed nine-year-old (“My Boyfriend Del”); another who becomes a cat-hoarder after a romantic disappointment (“You and Your Cats”); a dystopian RV cult (“RV People”); a postapocalyptic family (“After”). These vignettes are wholly original and strange, though their number (over 20) makes them blend together in a blur of dysfunction and gross-out detail. There are standouts, though, like “Brenda’s Kid,” whose eponymous mother tries not to hate her worthless son; “A Girl,” offering a teenage boy’s jaded perspective on his missing classmate; and the family of “Like,” seen from each of their perspectives at a passive-aggressive picnic. 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. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic.

July 1, 2013
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)