Kiss Me Someone: Stories - Hardcover

There is such a wondrous variety in these highly accomplished stories. They are rich with invention, with acute (sometimes alarming) awareness, dazzling insight, and pure, word virtuosity.--Richard Ford

Karen Shepard's characters vibrate with desire and disappointment, so obdurately individual that a whole world springs to life around them.--Andrea Barrett

Not since Virginia Woolf have the snares and scars of familial relationships been rendered with such brilliance, sensitivity, and icy understatement.--Ron Hansen

Shepard's writing is breathtaking in its ability to capture minor but revelatory personal insights. With her crisp prose and sharp observations, she views characters with devastating and unflinching clarity. . . . A daringly written dissection of raw emotion through short stories about women on the edge and what they long for most.--Shelf Awareness

In this captivating collection of stories, Karen Shepard turns her ever keen eye on women, and in her gaze is both love and a startling clarity. Readers of all kinds will find much to relish in this voice-- from its storytelling surprises to the insights and sharp observations it extends, over and over, to us on the other side of the page.--Aimee Bender

Dark yet sensitive explorations of family and love--of all kinds--from a masterful writer. The women at the centers of these stories are sharp-edged and complicated and irresistible; you won't be able to look away.--Celeste Ng

[Shepard] is unflinching in her depictions of self-destructive choices and betrayal as well as friendship and love. One of her characters uses the phrase "ecstatic friction" . . . that term could apply to the whole no-holds-barred collection.--Oprah Magazine

Shepard's short stories explore relationships and familial love in all their messy complexity. [Her] unapologetically flawed characters make this collection an honest portrayal of womanhood.--Ms. Magazine, "Great Reads for Feminists"

Shepard is so perceptive, we feel as if we are part of the scene ourselves . . . These stories, and the characters that inhabit them, are so vivid, they will surely stay with readers for a good long while.--Booklist

Shepard's work can disturb--but her sharp prose and insights into the human psyche make it worth the read.--Kirkus

Bold and unapologetic, Karen Shepard’s Kiss Me Someone is inhabited by women who walk the line between various states: adolescence and adulthood, stability and uncertainty, selfishness and compassion. They navigate the obstacles that come with mixed-race identity and instabilities in social class, and they use their liminal positions to leverage power. They employ rage and tenderness and logic and sex, but for all of their rationality they're drawn to self-destructive behavior. Shepard’s stories explore what we do to lessen our burdens of sadness and isolation; her characters, fiercely true to themselves, are caught between their desire to move beyond their isolation and a fear that it’s exactly where they belong.