RiverRead Books

Description

ARYN KYLE, whose award-winning novel The God of Animals was hailed as "reason for readers to rejoice" (USA Today), turns her gift for storytelling to the lives of girls and women in this spectacular collection. These eleven stories showcase Kyle’s keen eye for character, her humor, and her uncanny grasp of the loneliness, selfishness, and longing that underlie female experience. In "Nine," a young girl given to exaggeration escapes a humiliating ninth birthday celebration with the help of her father’s new girlfriend. The dubious benefits of sleeping with one’s boss are revealed when a bookstore manager defends an employee from an irate customer in the hilarious "Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore." A raid on a neighbor’s meth lab strengthens the unlikely friendship between a solitary woman and a Goth teenage girl in "Boys and Girls Like You and Me." And in a notable exception to the rule, "Captain’s Club" features a boy whose devotion to a lonely woman transforms his cruise vacation.In moments electric with sudden harmony or ruthless indifference, the girls and women in this collection provoke, beguile, and entertain. Writing with remarkable tenderness and wisdom, Kyle gives us a collection radiant with bittersweet revelations and startling insights, and secures her reputation as a major young talent.

About the Author

Aryn Kyle is the author of the bestselling novel The God of Animals and a graduate of the University of Montana writing program. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New American Voices 2005, Best American Short Stories 2007, and The Atlantic Monthly, for which her story "Foaling Season" won a National Magazine Award. She is also the recipient of the American Library Association's Alex Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’Award, and others.  She lives in New York.

Praise for Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories…

“In this absolutely knockout collection, Kyle channels girls (and women) on the verge—of making big mistakes, tumbling into the wrong kind of love, and reevaluating everything they ever thought they knew about themselves and the world. Brilliantly funny and moving, Kyle shocks and surprises in a voice that’s indelibly her own. Loved, loved, loved this book.”

--Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble

“By turns mordant and tender, often comic, always precise, these beautifully written stories go to the heart of the oddity of what we call ordinary life. Kyle succeeds in telling bitter truths about her characters—both the sinning and the sinned against—without succumbing to bitterness herself. Hope and affection for our sad bruised world shine through.”

--Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind

“A terrifically jittery, supercharged energy propels Aryn Kyle’s story collection. [She is] a writer who has talent to spare, and then some.”

--Elle

"No one captures millennial adolescence quite like Aryn Kyle…Boys and Girls Like You and Me features young women making their way in an America of stultifying suburban sameness...who go to ruthless lengths to get what they want…Kyle, a wonderfully mordant and unshowy writer who clearly remembers what it’s like to be simultaneously too young to know better and wise beyond one’s years, gives voice to their floating malaise.”

--Vogue

“Stories about the tender, terrifying path from youth to adulthood.”

--People

"[Kyle's] short story repertoire is intelligent indeed; each piece is compelling and compact, with prose that creates a whole world in only a handful of pages… They’re everyday stories, but Kyle’s succinct prose elevates them to a strikingly otherworldly status.”

-- Minnesota Daily