Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories - Softcover

Kyle, Aryn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416594817 ISBN 13: 9781416594819

Publisher: Scribner, 2011

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.

From Publishers Weekly

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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Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1416594817
• ISBN 13: 9781416594819
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240