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Don't Kiss Me: Stories
An explosive story collection from a bold, blistering new voice
With broken language, deep vernacular, unexpectedly fierce empathy, and a pace that’ll break your granny’s neck, Lindsay Hunter lures, cajoles, and wrenches readers into the wild world of Don’t Kiss Me.
Here you’ll meet Peggy Paula, who works the late shift at Perkin’s and envies the popular girls who come in to eat french fries and brag about how far they let the boys get with them. You’ll meet a woman in her mid-thirties pining for her mean-spirited, abusive boyfriend, Del, a nine-year-old who is in no way her actual boyfriend. And just try to resist the noir story of a reluctant, Afrin-addled detective.
Self-loathing, self-loving, and otherwise trapped by their own dumb selves, these characters make one cringe-worthy mistake after another. But for each bone-headed move, Hunter delivers a surprising moment that chokes you up as you peer into what seemed like deep emptiness and discover a profound longing for human understanding. It’s the collision of these moments that make this a powerful, alive book.
The stories of Don’t Kiss Me are united by Hunter’s singular voice and unflinching eye. By turns crass and tender, heartbreaking and devastatingly funny, her stories expose a world full of characters seemingly driven by desperation, but in the end, they’re the ones who get the last laugh. Hunter is at the forefront of the boldest, most provocative writers working now.
With broken language, deep vernacular, unexpectedly fierce empathy, and a pace that’ll break your granny’s neck, Lindsay Hunter lures, cajoles, and wrenches readers into the wild world of Don’t Kiss Me.
Here you’ll meet Peggy Paula, who works the late shift at Perkin’s and envies the popular girls who come in to eat french fries and brag about how far they let the boys get with them. You’ll meet a woman in her mid-thirties pining for her mean-spirited, abusive boyfriend, Del, a nine-year-old who is in no way her actual boyfriend. And just try to resist the noir story of a reluctant, Afrin-addled detective.
Self-loathing, self-loving, and otherwise trapped by their own dumb selves, these characters make one cringe-worthy mistake after another. But for each bone-headed move, Hunter delivers a surprising moment that chokes you up as you peer into what seemed like deep emptiness and discover a profound longing for human understanding. It’s the collision of these moments that make this a powerful, alive book.
The stories of Don’t Kiss Me are united by Hunter’s singular voice and unflinching eye. By turns crass and tender, heartbreaking and devastatingly funny, her stories expose a world full of characters seemingly driven by desperation, but in the end, they’re the ones who get the last laugh. Hunter is at the forefront of the boldest, most provocative writers working now.
192 pages, Paperback
First published July 2, 2013
15 people are currently reading
1385 people want to read
About the author
Lindsay Hunter
20 books438 followersLindsay Hunter received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She co-founded and co-hosted the groundbreaking Quickies! reading series, an event that focused on flash fiction. Her first book, Daddy’s, a collection of flash fiction, was published in 2010 by featherproof books, a boutique press in Chicago. Her second collection, DON’T KISS ME, was published by FSG Originals in 2013 and was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her first novel, Ugly Girls, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2014. The Huffington Post called it “a story that hits a note that’s been missing from the chorus of existing feminist literature.” Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a Book of the Month Club selection, a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award, and a 2017 NPR Great Read. Along with the writer Alex Higley, she runs the podcast I'm a Writer But, a series about writers with kids, jobs, and/or lives, and how they make it all work (or don't). She lives in Chicago with her family.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
January 4, 2013
The stories in this collection reflect a really unique and always engaging voice. I've not read a book like this which is also how i felt after reading Hunter's first collection, Daddy's. There's ugliness in these stories. Most of the people Hunter writes aren't terribly pleasant but they are real. They are the people we know and love and hate. There's a lot going on here with syntax and language and rhythm. Some of the stories will just break your heart with the truths they tell. I think I will review this with Susan Steinberg's Spectacle. I look forward to reading this collection again.
August 26, 2013
THIS REVIEW ORIGINALLY RAN AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.
Lindsay Hunter owes as much to Denis Johnson as she does to Mary Gaitskill. Her short stories, collected in Don’t Kiss Me (FSG Originals) do not hesitate to descend into the primal urges and dark, lusty behaviors that make us all animals at our core, but they also shine a light on the truth, a nugget of goodness at the center of what is quite often a lonely, depraved and tragic journey, one blanketed in a desire to be seen, to be loved—no matter who we are, or what we’ve done. Hunter’s characters work at diners and long to be included, they take care of their children while embracing their shortcomings, they chase boys into cornfields and kiss their best girlfriends, all the while longing to feel special and included.
One of the early stories in this her second short story collection, “Dishes” starts off in typical Lindsay Hunter fashion, setting the stage by showing us the raw recounting of every humble and embarrassing moment—no filter, just a mix of pride and surrender:
“At breakfast my kid practices his ABCs and barfs into his cereal bowl just before Q. My other kid points out how the barf had splashed onto the table in the shape of Oklahoma. I don’t tell him it looks more like Texas, he’s a little kid and if he wants to mistake Texas for Oklahoma it’s no skin off my tit. My husband wipes up the barf and I watch his shorts bunch in his ass.”
There is so much going on here. First, it’s funny, right? Whether you’ve been there a million times before, or this whole scene is a window into what parenthood might look like, the casual retelling, the “no skin off my tit,” summons up laughter. Later, as a chorus through the story, our protagonist keeps saying, “Big girls gotta eat!” She laughs at the fact that she’s overweight, she knows it, and she embraces it. She is who she is. You can almost picture her shrugging her shoulders as she says it. Her son packs her a lunch of nothing but Fruit Roll-Ups, Tootsie Rolls, half of a juice box, and a single Goldfish cracker. It’s funny, it’s sweet—and it’s kind of sad. We go along with the joke, but quite often after the punch line, there is an extended darkness that hangs in the air to remind us that these are people, not jokes—these are real lives, not just there for our amusement. Take the final lines from this same story, “Dishes” and tell me how it feels:
“…a song about a lonely desert wandered starts, I pass tacos pizzas chicken ice cream barbeque. The sky is pink meatblood, is a runny sorbet, the sun is a melting butterscotch, the sky is a dirty plate.”
Not so good, I think.
Another story that does a great job of luring us in with soft memories and sweet adolescence is “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula.” This might be my favorite story in the collection, and since it leads off the book, Lindsay Hunter may agree with me. The first thing we learn is that Peggy works in a diner, where she watches the popular kids come in after games and dances, always in the shadows, picking up lost lipsticks, making them her own, transferring the lust and heady glow that the girls have to her own seduction of the red-headed dishwasher weeks later.
The second things we learn is that “Peggy Paula has a kidney-shaped scar on her lower back from falling backward out an open window backward at a disco.” She went there to meet men, but it was a gay nightclub, so she didn’t have any luck. Tumbling into a dumpster, pissed on by an apologetic blonde boy, this is a memory that she cherishes, even though she was hurt, even robbed by the club goer. The memory she clings to is that he called her special.
The third thing we learn about Peggy Paula is that she is having an affair with a married man who worked at the local video store. Throughout the story we get all of the sweaty moments in back seats, the desperation and grunting, the echo of shut doors as these men use her, and walk away. But what brings the story full circle, what really punches you in the gut are the final lines of the story, after they’ve been caught, what Lindsay Hunter does best—showing us the truth and motivation that drove Peggy to commit these questionable acts:
“…and maybe that’s why she let the man in two nights later, had to see his eyes, had to feel again, and she kept letting the man in, she kept letting the man in, his smell the hair on his chest the delicate skin above his pelvis the muscles in his thighs his calloused hands the shapes of his toes the gold in his eyes the missing molar the mole on his back the heart in his chest the breaths in and out he was alive he was another he was a man and Peggy Paula let him, she let him, because if no one is there to touch you are you even really there?”
If you don’t take a deep breath there, and let out a heavy sigh, nodding your head, maybe tearing up a bit, swallowing your judgment, muttering, “Damn,” under your breath—then maybe you don’t have a heart, just a lump of coal where that pumping, anxious beast should rest.
And the taboo—what about that, the deviant, the sexual, the secrets? That’s another part of what makes Lindsay Hunter such a brilliant writer, her willingness to risk everything on the page, to say what we’re all thinking, to reveal those moments we’d prefer the world never saw. Here are two quick examples.
The first is from “Plans,” where our female lead kisses a teacher, and steals a lipstick, just to see how it feels, to get that rush of adrenaline:
“I wore that lipstick one night when we all met up to swim and it was so dark I let a boy take off my bottoms, the lipstick smeared and greasy all around my mouth and its crayon smell all over the boy, and then I put a ribbon on that lipstick and gave it to Momma for Christmas.”
She likes to cross lines, break rules—stealing, kissing teachers, taking off her pants at the lake, the dirty lipstick now a gift to her mother? “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” you might ask. It seems that she does.
And then there is “Me and Gin.” It’s a sweet story on the surface, but just under the bruised flesh is a dysfunctional childhood, parents that are damaged and absent, friendships that are anything but healthy. The opening lines:
“Me and Gin play Lips. This a game where you see how long you can touch lips before you need to scream. Gin always the one screaming first, I guess not always, sometimes I scream first cause I don’t want to seem like no weird lips lover.
Me and Gin’s both girls. See.”
And no, I’m not giving you all of the juicy parts in this review, you’ll have to pick up the book and read it yourself.
When I think of the rabbits in “Summer Massacre,” it immediately reminds me of “Emergency” by the aforementioned Denis Johnson. When I read the slick sex in the back seat of a car in “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula,” I think of the previously cited Mary Gaitskill and the power struggle that is “Romantic Weekend.” When I pause to remember “Plans” and the final words of the boy hovering over our girl when she says, “I ain’t no bitch like your brother called me,” and he answers, as they finish their grunting and heaving, “Ain’t you, he said, ain’t you?” I’m transported to the heartbreak that is the final scene in “Life Expectancy” by Holly Goddard Jones. But whatever other voices flitter about you as you read Don’t Kiss Me, familiar dysfunction, dark roads you’ve been down before, know that Lindsay Hunter is an original, she is fearless, and she will always be a soothsayer—telling stories with heart, compassion, and authority.
Lindsay Hunter owes as much to Denis Johnson as she does to Mary Gaitskill. Her short stories, collected in Don’t Kiss Me (FSG Originals) do not hesitate to descend into the primal urges and dark, lusty behaviors that make us all animals at our core, but they also shine a light on the truth, a nugget of goodness at the center of what is quite often a lonely, depraved and tragic journey, one blanketed in a desire to be seen, to be loved—no matter who we are, or what we’ve done. Hunter’s characters work at diners and long to be included, they take care of their children while embracing their shortcomings, they chase boys into cornfields and kiss their best girlfriends, all the while longing to feel special and included.
One of the early stories in this her second short story collection, “Dishes” starts off in typical Lindsay Hunter fashion, setting the stage by showing us the raw recounting of every humble and embarrassing moment—no filter, just a mix of pride and surrender:
“At breakfast my kid practices his ABCs and barfs into his cereal bowl just before Q. My other kid points out how the barf had splashed onto the table in the shape of Oklahoma. I don’t tell him it looks more like Texas, he’s a little kid and if he wants to mistake Texas for Oklahoma it’s no skin off my tit. My husband wipes up the barf and I watch his shorts bunch in his ass.”
There is so much going on here. First, it’s funny, right? Whether you’ve been there a million times before, or this whole scene is a window into what parenthood might look like, the casual retelling, the “no skin off my tit,” summons up laughter. Later, as a chorus through the story, our protagonist keeps saying, “Big girls gotta eat!” She laughs at the fact that she’s overweight, she knows it, and she embraces it. She is who she is. You can almost picture her shrugging her shoulders as she says it. Her son packs her a lunch of nothing but Fruit Roll-Ups, Tootsie Rolls, half of a juice box, and a single Goldfish cracker. It’s funny, it’s sweet—and it’s kind of sad. We go along with the joke, but quite often after the punch line, there is an extended darkness that hangs in the air to remind us that these are people, not jokes—these are real lives, not just there for our amusement. Take the final lines from this same story, “Dishes” and tell me how it feels:
“…a song about a lonely desert wandered starts, I pass tacos pizzas chicken ice cream barbeque. The sky is pink meatblood, is a runny sorbet, the sun is a melting butterscotch, the sky is a dirty plate.”
Not so good, I think.
Another story that does a great job of luring us in with soft memories and sweet adolescence is “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula.” This might be my favorite story in the collection, and since it leads off the book, Lindsay Hunter may agree with me. The first thing we learn is that Peggy works in a diner, where she watches the popular kids come in after games and dances, always in the shadows, picking up lost lipsticks, making them her own, transferring the lust and heady glow that the girls have to her own seduction of the red-headed dishwasher weeks later.
The second things we learn is that “Peggy Paula has a kidney-shaped scar on her lower back from falling backward out an open window backward at a disco.” She went there to meet men, but it was a gay nightclub, so she didn’t have any luck. Tumbling into a dumpster, pissed on by an apologetic blonde boy, this is a memory that she cherishes, even though she was hurt, even robbed by the club goer. The memory she clings to is that he called her special.
The third thing we learn about Peggy Paula is that she is having an affair with a married man who worked at the local video store. Throughout the story we get all of the sweaty moments in back seats, the desperation and grunting, the echo of shut doors as these men use her, and walk away. But what brings the story full circle, what really punches you in the gut are the final lines of the story, after they’ve been caught, what Lindsay Hunter does best—showing us the truth and motivation that drove Peggy to commit these questionable acts:
“…and maybe that’s why she let the man in two nights later, had to see his eyes, had to feel again, and she kept letting the man in, she kept letting the man in, his smell the hair on his chest the delicate skin above his pelvis the muscles in his thighs his calloused hands the shapes of his toes the gold in his eyes the missing molar the mole on his back the heart in his chest the breaths in and out he was alive he was another he was a man and Peggy Paula let him, she let him, because if no one is there to touch you are you even really there?”
If you don’t take a deep breath there, and let out a heavy sigh, nodding your head, maybe tearing up a bit, swallowing your judgment, muttering, “Damn,” under your breath—then maybe you don’t have a heart, just a lump of coal where that pumping, anxious beast should rest.
And the taboo—what about that, the deviant, the sexual, the secrets? That’s another part of what makes Lindsay Hunter such a brilliant writer, her willingness to risk everything on the page, to say what we’re all thinking, to reveal those moments we’d prefer the world never saw. Here are two quick examples.
The first is from “Plans,” where our female lead kisses a teacher, and steals a lipstick, just to see how it feels, to get that rush of adrenaline:
“I wore that lipstick one night when we all met up to swim and it was so dark I let a boy take off my bottoms, the lipstick smeared and greasy all around my mouth and its crayon smell all over the boy, and then I put a ribbon on that lipstick and gave it to Momma for Christmas.”
She likes to cross lines, break rules—stealing, kissing teachers, taking off her pants at the lake, the dirty lipstick now a gift to her mother? “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” you might ask. It seems that she does.
And then there is “Me and Gin.” It’s a sweet story on the surface, but just under the bruised flesh is a dysfunctional childhood, parents that are damaged and absent, friendships that are anything but healthy. The opening lines:
“Me and Gin play Lips. This a game where you see how long you can touch lips before you need to scream. Gin always the one screaming first, I guess not always, sometimes I scream first cause I don’t want to seem like no weird lips lover.
Me and Gin’s both girls. See.”
And no, I’m not giving you all of the juicy parts in this review, you’ll have to pick up the book and read it yourself.
When I think of the rabbits in “Summer Massacre,” it immediately reminds me of “Emergency” by the aforementioned Denis Johnson. When I read the slick sex in the back seat of a car in “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula,” I think of the previously cited Mary Gaitskill and the power struggle that is “Romantic Weekend.” When I pause to remember “Plans” and the final words of the boy hovering over our girl when she says, “I ain’t no bitch like your brother called me,” and he answers, as they finish their grunting and heaving, “Ain’t you, he said, ain’t you?” I’m transported to the heartbreak that is the final scene in “Life Expectancy” by Holly Goddard Jones. But whatever other voices flitter about you as you read Don’t Kiss Me, familiar dysfunction, dark roads you’ve been down before, know that Lindsay Hunter is an original, she is fearless, and she will always be a soothsayer—telling stories with heart, compassion, and authority.
September 8, 2013
Another book of jaw-dropping fictions from Chicago's most loveable freakazoid. Sentences come at you so ruthless and broken glass-sharp. Hunter relishes in her characters' grossest utterances. There were times when I was reminded of the wild cut-up style of William S. Burroughs and other times when I was reminded of the unhinged fictions of Lidia Yuknavitch. But mostly, this is Lindsay Hunter, creating her own mad territories. And even though there were a few times when I felt like the work was hard to grasp, for the most part, my mind was blown, amazed, lit up, and scared.
March 20, 2015
There are some truly brilliant stories in this collection, but really it's more about the details than the whole. That goes for the stories themselves, as well as the style. The best - such as 'Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula', 'Plans' and 'Heart' - are short and broken-up snapshots of the lives of dysfunctional characters; weird, dirty and bleak, but really, really gorgeous anyway. The high-concept stories don't always work quite as well, partly because you're constantly being propelled back to the striking beauty and effectiveness of particular sentences rather than whatever they're skirting around. Occasionally, Hunter's depictions of everyday discomfort stray further into more explicit disgust and border on bizarro, for example 'After', which begins 'After the apocalypse...' and goes on to, mainly, list outlandishly grotesque sights.
The showpiece story, the longest, is 'Our Man', which - seriously - reminded me of Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp , with its fragmentary and surreal narration, stray threads and recurring characters, its side-on, non-linear examination of an indistinct and possibly imagined crime. Like Antwerp, I wasn't sure whether it was nonsense or a work of genius, or, of course, both. A more general comparison for the whole collection is Amelia Gray's Threats - equally off-kilter and vaguely disturbing/disturbingly vague, with a similar overarching voice - although I enjoyed this more.
I probably did this book a disservice by hungrily reading most of the stories at once. Mostly bite-sized - there are 26 of them in this 193-page collection - Hunter's stories are so sharp and bright that they are best devoured individually, spread out between other reading.
The showpiece story, the longest, is 'Our Man', which - seriously - reminded me of Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp , with its fragmentary and surreal narration, stray threads and recurring characters, its side-on, non-linear examination of an indistinct and possibly imagined crime. Like Antwerp, I wasn't sure whether it was nonsense or a work of genius, or, of course, both. A more general comparison for the whole collection is Amelia Gray's Threats - equally off-kilter and vaguely disturbing/disturbingly vague, with a similar overarching voice - although I enjoyed this more.
I probably did this book a disservice by hungrily reading most of the stories at once. Mostly bite-sized - there are 26 of them in this 193-page collection - Hunter's stories are so sharp and bright that they are best devoured individually, spread out between other reading.
January 6, 2014
Reading the many reviews on GRs I imagined wild, damaged and grotesque characters challenging the reader to a point that sets you squarely in their desperate sights, where you can't help but be damaged and exhilarated along with them. To my disappointment I landed somewhere distant to that strange centre, a place far less exciting.
On one hand there are a few 5 star gobsmackers, such as the opening short story (Dearest Peggy Paula) and the wondrous RV People, but there are also stories that fester in self loathing and whilst I don't mind the dark, there was too much ugly hate in it and more importantly, no human face to put on it.
At times the prose had the succinct and succulent phonetics of great poetry (Catie Rosemurgy, Sharon Olds). Those moments stood alone but entirely out of place, like a peace offering at a slaughter.
The bawdy laughs and heart wrenching milliseconds strewn about are just not enough to go on but with a writer with a story like Peggy Paula in her, I'm interested in what is next.
2.5 stars
August 6, 2013
One of the most well-written, funny-sad, beautifully disgusting books I have read this year. I loved every one of these short stories, which is rare. Each story is unique and Hunter's ability to write so convincingly from male/female/child/adult perspectives is amazing. Some of the stories reminded me of a darker, woman-writer version of writer/debutante Scott McClanahan. I think I have fallen in love with Lindsay Hunter.
These were my favorite 'quotes' from DON'T KISS ME:
"Me wondering why they don't say nothing about a kiss being salty as a tear."
"...THE SUN MELTING LIKE THE DISCONTINUED PSYCHEDELIC SHERBERT LINE."
"The sky is pink meatblood, is a runny sorbet, the sun is a melting butterscotch, the sky is a dirty plate."
"Time is a thing that moves. We are not the ones moving."
"He wondered if things shimmered when she looked at them as they did for him. He wondered if she felt like her insides were on her outsides all the time like he did."
"Loneliness is a nightly death, bed a burial."
"It's me. You can be you. I've been honest and I'm being honest now. Blood is just as thick as we've heard. Blood doesn't cool if you admit relief. That rust-colored pump will throb on and on."
"How about: blood congeals and forms a skin. Or: our man's dying breath lasted fifteen seconds. This: we both love(d) you more than life itself."
"Dearest love, let me count the ways. Dismemberment, garroted, poisoned, drowned, named. I read that as soon as a species is named it begins its travels up the endangered list. Discovery meaning death."
"If the end of the world came...what? If the end of the world came...but he just felt tired. If the end of the world came, good night."
"...I ain't no delicate sunflower juddering in your grandma's vase..."
These were my favorite 'quotes' from DON'T KISS ME:
"Me wondering why they don't say nothing about a kiss being salty as a tear."
"...THE SUN MELTING LIKE THE DISCONTINUED PSYCHEDELIC SHERBERT LINE."
"The sky is pink meatblood, is a runny sorbet, the sun is a melting butterscotch, the sky is a dirty plate."
"Time is a thing that moves. We are not the ones moving."
"He wondered if things shimmered when she looked at them as they did for him. He wondered if she felt like her insides were on her outsides all the time like he did."
"Loneliness is a nightly death, bed a burial."
"It's me. You can be you. I've been honest and I'm being honest now. Blood is just as thick as we've heard. Blood doesn't cool if you admit relief. That rust-colored pump will throb on and on."
"How about: blood congeals and forms a skin. Or: our man's dying breath lasted fifteen seconds. This: we both love(d) you more than life itself."
"Dearest love, let me count the ways. Dismemberment, garroted, poisoned, drowned, named. I read that as soon as a species is named it begins its travels up the endangered list. Discovery meaning death."
"If the end of the world came...what? If the end of the world came...but he just felt tired. If the end of the world came, good night."
"...I ain't no delicate sunflower juddering in your grandma's vase..."
July 19, 2020
Lindsay Hunter has some serious writing chops and her command of language and voice is impressive and exciting to read. Pushing to the background the broader experimentation with narrative stances, the second person, the first-person plural, the split-columns multiple narrators, the ALL CAPS, the stories that careen from clause to clause for several paragraphs, pages even, before finally a period appears, that full stop, only to launch another one just like it. So, pushing all that to the background, what inhabits these stories all is the mastery of voice. If you were teaching a creative writing class in narrative voice this collection could be your textbook. Hunter brings these voices to life with particular details, syntax, cadence, but mostly with her eye on the prize: from the inside out, how do these narrators experience the world? And how would they speak? Character-infected language. And she just kills it story after story.
The characters are mostly marginalized and dysfunctional or in dysfunctional situations. Many are children/teenagers. Nearly all are suffering some humiliation, often self-inflicted. The language puts us in their world, in their experience. The mission of these stories, if there is one, seems to be: experience the other. Empathize. Unfortunately, the type of people who maybe most need to learn to empathize aren't likely readers of this book.
The characters are mostly marginalized and dysfunctional or in dysfunctional situations. Many are children/teenagers. Nearly all are suffering some humiliation, often self-inflicted. The language puts us in their world, in their experience. The mission of these stories, if there is one, seems to be: experience the other. Empathize. Unfortunately, the type of people who maybe most need to learn to empathize aren't likely readers of this book.
September 21, 2013
This one was hit-or-miss for me, but in a grand slam-or-home run kind of way. Some of the stories here are perfectly devastating, while others felt technically flawed, when the author's own intelligence and insights conflicted with the stylized vernacular. Perhaps that's more of an editorial critique. There's no denying the author's mastery of language, her courageous choices, and her stark originality. Highly recommend. Be the first to tell your friends about this beautiful new voice in contemporary fiction.
June 12, 2019
This book incinerated me.
Her stories are bold, violent, and fed-up. The only thing tougher than the world are characters themselves, who have no interest in being likable. They are unapologetic in the roughest, realest way.
The stories hit quick and hard, like a smash-and-grab. Definitely finished it wanting more.
Her stories are bold, violent, and fed-up. The only thing tougher than the world are characters themselves, who have no interest in being likable. They are unapologetic in the roughest, realest way.
The stories hit quick and hard, like a smash-and-grab. Definitely finished it wanting more.
April 28, 2022
the first story “three things you should know about peggy paula” was good, i didn’t mind “like” as well. the rest felt like an over ambitious grotesque moral dilemma that i had to push myself through. this book may be for someone, but it was not for me.
July 10, 2024
Okay um…I’m usually a fan of short stories but I didn’t like this one. There were some stories where the author’s voice felt a bit inauthentic to me and some were hard to follow. I preferred the sillier, more lighthearted stories, but there were only a few of these.
September 4, 2013
There is journalling, where you brainstorm out your thoughts. No editing when it's done. There is staring into space, day dreaming, running through a list of thoughts, sometimes linking mostly not. To lay out that my eyes set on the red traffic light. Then noticed it was kinda hot pink, well with the sun in its position and all, flimsy bulb maybe, a guy with two coats and no shoes rides a bike right through it, causes on comers to hit their breaks, back end of a Volkswagon bounces up then back down again, a middle finger pushed in the direction of the daredevil, the daredevil completely unaware he's been a daredevil. The light is more red, I guess, not so much hot pink, the sky behind it is pink, rain is coming...
This is what DON'T KISS ME reads like. Like a thought train captured on paper. There are more commas than periods. And more “Look! A Squirrel!” moments than concentrated observations. I loved it. There are rules in writing. Or, more like tried and true suggestions. But I love seeing them broken. If you can break them, you gotta do it like a boss. And Lindsay Hunter does such a good job with each of her stories. Some are all in capital letters with no punctuation. Some are one complete paragraph, thoughts separated by commas, and so forth. Rules broken and it all works.
My favorite has got to be CANDLES. A woman describing her body type like a candle. Rattling on with a small, almost unnoticeable plot that she's into this guy named Julian. It's broken up by the worst case of ADD I've ever read, mixed with how scented candles really smell. Favorite line: There came a day when I ran out of class to barf up against the lockers, there was a baby for awhile but then it went away.” Comes out of no where.
I dug each short story because they were honest, underbelly of a person stuff. No holds barred. While most were reflections on personal relationships and self-worth, LETA'S MUMMY was a very unique break. A story about a young girls pet mummy the family has no idea how to control.
The final story in this volume, for which the entire collection borrows its name, DON'T KISS ME, has got to be the most honest, outrageous story of obsession that I've ever enjoyed. A great finisher to this collection.
But what I came away with was an interest in Lindsay Hunter as a writer. I want to know how she writes. My imagination says she pounds away at a keyboard, letting loose a brainstorm of thoughts. In one take, the story is there. Because that's how each reads. And if she does manage to do this, that makes her rather exceptional. I wish to see more from Ms. Hunter. I'll be there buying a copy of her next work.
And if I have yet to convince you that this collection of shorts deserves your time and the five stars that I grant it here, consider my favorite quote from the entire volume, one that made me pause and cry with all hilarity, from the story, OUR MAN: “The detective held his breath driving past the cemetery, pushing the panties in his mouth just short of gagging.”
How can you not want to read that?
This is what DON'T KISS ME reads like. Like a thought train captured on paper. There are more commas than periods. And more “Look! A Squirrel!” moments than concentrated observations. I loved it. There are rules in writing. Or, more like tried and true suggestions. But I love seeing them broken. If you can break them, you gotta do it like a boss. And Lindsay Hunter does such a good job with each of her stories. Some are all in capital letters with no punctuation. Some are one complete paragraph, thoughts separated by commas, and so forth. Rules broken and it all works.
My favorite has got to be CANDLES. A woman describing her body type like a candle. Rattling on with a small, almost unnoticeable plot that she's into this guy named Julian. It's broken up by the worst case of ADD I've ever read, mixed with how scented candles really smell. Favorite line: There came a day when I ran out of class to barf up against the lockers, there was a baby for awhile but then it went away.” Comes out of no where.
I dug each short story because they were honest, underbelly of a person stuff. No holds barred. While most were reflections on personal relationships and self-worth, LETA'S MUMMY was a very unique break. A story about a young girls pet mummy the family has no idea how to control.
The final story in this volume, for which the entire collection borrows its name, DON'T KISS ME, has got to be the most honest, outrageous story of obsession that I've ever enjoyed. A great finisher to this collection.
But what I came away with was an interest in Lindsay Hunter as a writer. I want to know how she writes. My imagination says she pounds away at a keyboard, letting loose a brainstorm of thoughts. In one take, the story is there. Because that's how each reads. And if she does manage to do this, that makes her rather exceptional. I wish to see more from Ms. Hunter. I'll be there buying a copy of her next work.
And if I have yet to convince you that this collection of shorts deserves your time and the five stars that I grant it here, consider my favorite quote from the entire volume, one that made me pause and cry with all hilarity, from the story, OUR MAN: “The detective held his breath driving past the cemetery, pushing the panties in his mouth just short of gagging.”
How can you not want to read that?
July 3, 2013
All in all, I enjoyed these stories. The voice is very unique, and very real. Some of my favorites were "Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula," "Brenda's Kid," "Leta's Mummy," "Darren's Baby Girl," and the title story, "Don't Kiss Me." I found these stories to be the most unique, enjoyable, and personally relatable.
I do wish the book was a bit longer though--I finished it in about four hours. I also wish there had been a bit more of a variety in the stories; nearly every character had that 'Junie B. Jones, but vulgar' tone--uneducated, yet sassy. Also it seemed like every single character was fat and ugly, or at least considered themselves fat and ugly. There was plenty of variety in the situations and lives of the characters, yet sometimes it felt like it was the same person telling each story.
I found this to be a quick, enjoyable read. I loved reading from the uncomfortable places that are the minds of sluts, drug addicts, and crazy people, with low self-esteem to boot. This was my first Lindsay Hunter book, and I plan on checking out her other titles.
October 8, 2013
Much like Frank Bill's Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories and Alan Heathcock's Volt: Stories, the characters who populate Lindsey Hunter's second collection of short stories, Don't Kiss Me, are broken, intensely raw human beings existing along the fringes of America's heartland. Each story offers a brief glimpse into lives distorted by oddball obsessions and all too common abuses of trust. What I found most striking about these stories is Hunter's near stream of conscious style--which harkens to the styles of Hubert Selby, jr. and Dennis Johnson--that perfectly captures the mindset and base nature of her characters. But most of all, it's Hunter's wholly believable characters that make this collection such an intense reading experience. These men, women, and children are your wives and husbands, teachers, next door neighbors, your nieces and nephews; they are the ignored and the barely there.
May 9, 2013
There's so much to love about Lindsay Hunter's writing. I can honestly say she is uniquely her own. This collection showed me all she can do, in a way that even raised the fictive ante on 2010's Daddy's collection (and to be sure, that is a great book). I mean, she effectively renders a post-presidential Nixon. Cuts to a believable man beneath the veneer of evasion, traducing and undeniably effective politicking. Surreal elements abound and thread the narratives of very real living, breathing characters, whose vices and motives might not be entirely alien to us (even when their behavior and fantasies are). It's a real gem. It should be on your shelf sooner rather than later, if you ask me.
July 19, 2013
This is a tough book to rate/describe – on the one hand, the technical ability on display is amazing. The way Hunter writes is immediate and potent and you can’t deny that. But I could imagine someone else – or even myself, at a different time or in a different place – reading these stories and being completely turned off by that ability instead of cautiously in awe of it. These stories are at times gross, sad, depressing, hilarious, frightening, confusing… but they’re all intensely refreshing. Take that as you will.
More at RB: http://wp.me/pGVzJ-LB
More at RB: http://wp.me/pGVzJ-LB
July 25, 2013
You'll read this collection of short stories with a combination of electrified intensity and mild disgust. At times it seems Hunter is assaulting the reader with the originality of her language and style, an assault that might make you recoil, until somewhere around page twenty you find yourself begging Hunter to hit you again.
July 11, 2013
I love the rawness in these stories. By raw, I don't mean the writing, which is definitely honed and crafted (particularly the amazing voices). I mean the rawness in the humanity of the characters, the urgency and the mashing of the normal/beautiful/disgusting. These are powerful stories.
September 23, 2013
This collection of short stories was a bit too spotty for me. There were a few brilliant slices-of-life, but there were too many misfires when the author seemingly tried to be too avant garde, and just ended up being obtuse.
Want to read
December 13, 2013I loved 'Daddy's', one of my books of the year in 2010, so looking forward to this new collection, once again brought to my attention by the admirable Kevin Sampsell.
July 30, 2014
Just could not get with the scatter-gun, disjointed style, the vernacular, nothing. Someone here suggested that if you read the first - 3 page - story and liked it, you would enjoy the rest. I wish I had read that before I chose it.
July 31, 2013
This collection is a slow dance with words that can't be forgotten. Their weight grows by the day. After the first piece I could only say "I feel crushed" to explain my delight.
November 7, 2025
As if there was any question that this book would get 5 stars — incredible!
August 19, 2013
In your face, first person monologues from the sexually exploited underclass that somehow also manages to be mind-blowingly funny.
October 11, 2013
I interviewed Lindsay at the Tin House blog: http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/28456/te...
March 21, 2016
Such a great collection. Super quirky and imaginative. Definitely out of left field and is written to shock the audience! I loved this collection of short stories, refreshing in a dark, dirty way.
October 10, 2018
My favorite stories here shine a light on the awkward and the vulnerable and the people and situations that are usually ignored. That kinda thing is exactly why I read fiction.
My least favorite stories are the ones I consider weird for the sake of weird/gross for the sake of gross.
My favorite stories featured the lonely girl sleeping with the married man, the chubby and self deprecating woman with the manchild husband, the runaway (abandoned) teen. My least favorite involved a character describing a turd as sausage like (and actually tempted to eat it...granted, it was a post apocalyptic setting, but still), Richard Nixon screwing his wife and fantasizing about Jackie O. I'm not really a fan of "ironic" famous people stories, the kind where the author has no access to or insight on the famous person and their name is just kinda used for a quick gag.
I do feel like the strong stories far outnumber the weird/gross just for the sake of it stories (but they are really weird and gross and not for the squeamish).
In every story, without fail, I'm impressed with her eye for observational detail and the playfulness of her language. I feel like I should really share some examples of her language to whet your appetite. Just so many killer sentences I feel a bit overwhelmed trying to pick some or hunt them down. Okay - "There went the sun. Quick as a cookie into milk" (from "Gerald's Wife"). A grown woman disappointed in her almost-grown son thinks - "...please and thank you but he does swing that penis around like it's tossing candy coins over a parade of sluts..." (from "Brenda's Kid").
Overall, I feel like the stronger stories have empathy for the characters and the ones I wasn't so crazy about are kinda laughing at them or using them for shock value.
My least favorite stories are the ones I consider weird for the sake of weird/gross for the sake of gross.
My favorite stories featured the lonely girl sleeping with the married man, the chubby and self deprecating woman with the manchild husband, the runaway (abandoned) teen. My least favorite involved a character describing a turd as sausage like (and actually tempted to eat it...granted, it was a post apocalyptic setting, but still), Richard Nixon screwing his wife and fantasizing about Jackie O. I'm not really a fan of "ironic" famous people stories, the kind where the author has no access to or insight on the famous person and their name is just kinda used for a quick gag.
I do feel like the strong stories far outnumber the weird/gross just for the sake of it stories (but they are really weird and gross and not for the squeamish).
In every story, without fail, I'm impressed with her eye for observational detail and the playfulness of her language. I feel like I should really share some examples of her language to whet your appetite. Just so many killer sentences I feel a bit overwhelmed trying to pick some or hunt them down. Okay - "There went the sun. Quick as a cookie into milk" (from "Gerald's Wife"). A grown woman disappointed in her almost-grown son thinks - "...please and thank you but he does swing that penis around like it's tossing candy coins over a parade of sluts..." (from "Brenda's Kid").
Overall, I feel like the stronger stories have empathy for the characters and the ones I wasn't so crazy about are kinda laughing at them or using them for shock value.
February 8, 2019
This collection was very disappointing. I usually love and can't get enough of short story collections but this was awful. There is next to no punctuation in it (which I am discovering is something I really don't like).
It is also all over the place and very confusing. Not one of these stories made any sense to me... I was confused and frustrated the whole way through. I cheated a little and just skipped the last 5 stories... I just couldn't bring myself to put my mind through any more of that literary torture.
I'm shocked that this was so bad, as I usually devour short story collections (I've already read 3 this year), but something just didn't sit right with me and if a book frustrates me, I don't see the point of giving it my time or a decent rating.
It is also all over the place and very confusing. Not one of these stories made any sense to me... I was confused and frustrated the whole way through. I cheated a little and just skipped the last 5 stories... I just couldn't bring myself to put my mind through any more of that literary torture.
I'm shocked that this was so bad, as I usually devour short story collections (I've already read 3 this year), but something just didn't sit right with me and if a book frustrates me, I don't see the point of giving it my time or a decent rating.
December 15, 2020
“If you’ve never known love it’s clear you’d mistake it for something else. Loneliness perhaps. Greed.” Lindsay’s short stories often feature women who feel intensely — the type who say fuck the consequences, I really want this right now and I’m gonna get it, I don’t give a shit what happens in the future, I must follow this feeling now, now, now. There’s desire, there’s excitement, there’s debasement, there’s regret, there’s just life going on, looping around, continuing despite the big mistakes. There are also some short, dark postapocalyptic pieces that unquieted me and a longish experimental story that didn’t work so well for me. But the prose pulses with energy.
January 13, 2025
Discomfiting, edgy, crass, gross. A montage of the worst moments in the lives of unfortunate people. I could only handle fully reading three or four of the stories, I skimmed the rest, and I'm left feeling nauseous and depressed. The writer has talent in eliciting the maximum horror and disgust from her audience using a minimum of words. Might be worth a read if you're having a terrible day and need company in that.. If you're having a good day, this book is the emotional equivalent of having your tires slashed.
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