The Kissing List Hardback - 2012

Media reviews

"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." --The New York Times Book Review

"Imaginative and skillfully written." --The New Yorker

"Filled with funny observations and sharp insights....cleverness is the defining virtue of this collection....Think Lena Dunham’s Girls." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Funny and fresh." --New York Daily News

"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." --Grantland.com

"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." --San Francisco Examiner

"Reents impresses with her knowledge of conflicted young-adult hearts and her astute portrait of their social lives....Sharp work from a promising writer." --Kirkus

"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." --Booklist

"Formally adept...Reents has created a collection that is emotionally vivid and stylistically interesting." --Publishers Weekly

"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." --Lauren Groff, author of the New York Times Bestseller The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia
 
"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." --Anthony Doerr, author of Memory Wall and About Grace
 
"Stephanie Reents' stories are lucid, exciting, and unlike anything I've read before." --Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries 
 
"Gird yourself for the talent of Stephanie Reents, whose astringent wit and innovative, crunk-like rhythms could carry this collection alone. The surprise is how deeply moving The Kissing List is, too: at once sassy and soulful, and tart enough to make your eyes water and--yes--your lips pucker." --Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Others
 
"The Kissing List is carried forward by a fierce and clear-eyed curiosity about human connection and the creation of self. With sassy sexiness, sophisticated humor, and consummate intelligence, Reents draws us into her exploration of what it means to love. I kept hurrying back to the book so I could read it some more—it’s as compulsively readable as it is perceptive." --Aurelie Sheehan, author of History Lesson for Girls

"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." --Suzanne Rivecca, author of Death is not an Option

"Nothing you’ve read before will prepare you for these sly, funny, beautifully off-kilter stories. In Reents’s hands, tragedy and comedy aren’t so much related as indistinguishable, and the only happy marriage is between romance and despair.  I guarantee The Kissing List will occupy a place in your heart." – Eric Puchner, author of Model Home