Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories - Hardcover

Kyle, Aryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416594809 ISBN 13: 9781416594802

Publisher: Scribner, 2010

Synopsis

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 this title

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.

Reviews

This sure-to-please collection by Kyle (The God of Animals) probes the frequently wrongheaded choices girls and young women make to feel happy and loved. Girls growing up with fathers whose wives have vanished, girls perilously desirous of acceptance, young women enthralled by unsuitable men: these are the characters inhabiting Kyle's low-key tales. In Nine, the young protagonist tells elaborate lies to deflect the pain of her mother's absence, though her attempts at befriending her father's new girlfriend go terribly awry. Allegiance depicts the ruthless extent the new girl will go to get invited to a sleepover party held by the popular girls, especially as her mother offers suggestions for tormenting the weak. Similarly, in Brides, the new girl in the high school play learns how to ingratiate herself with the lead and the pervy theater teacher. Meanwhile, dallying with married men only brings grief to smart women, as in Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore and the moving title story. There's no shortage of heartache, and Kyle's varied approaches to it consistently reveals new ways of feeling bad. (Apr.)
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Kyle, whose first novel, The God of Animals (2007), was selected as an Alex Award winner, turns her creative energy and dark imagination to shorter fiction in her second book, producing 11 stories that are irresistibly readable in the same way that a goiter or a carbuncle demands careful scrutiny. The girls, young women, and, in one case, 12-year-old boy who serve as protagonists are or soon will be unrelievedly miserable, disappointed by life, betrayed by love, and convinced—like Lilly in “Company of Strangers”—that they they will “die horribly.” As she did in her novel, Kyle reinforces the bleakness of mood and tone with loving descriptions of unsavory settings (a school is “a dirty scab of a place”; skies are “the color of concrete”; and air smells like “grease and diesel fumes”). There is an almost perverse artistry at work here, however, and at least two of the stories—“Nine” and “A Lot like Fun”—are near-perfect exercises in persuading readers that the hallmark of human nature is imperfectability and that truth is its ultimate falsehood. --Michael Cart

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1416594809
• ISBN 13: 9781416594802
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240