Kiss Me [Paperback]

In Kiss Me, his debut short story collection, Andrew Pyper pays homage to Alice Munro in clipped but succinct Hemingway sentences. Pyper's admiration for Munro is quite open, and he acknowledges his debt to the American master by giving a would-be writer in one of the stories the nickname "Hemingway."

Pyper's characters are either subverted by the bogus innocence of their rural setting in small-town Ontario or thoroughly undone when they dare to move to the big smoke of Toronto or Montreal. Some of these tales are simple coming-of-age stories, while others chronicle lives of silent suffering, but most return to the act of writing itself. If this underlying emphasis at time makes Kiss Me seem rather artificial, there is still some excellent work. "Camp Sacred Heart," perhaps the finest story, is a bittersweet remembrance of childhood. In "The Author Shows a Little Kindness," Pyper gives Mary, a middle-aged social worker, a chance to be a writer. "Once she took a real run at it, Mary's first sentence has been easily written, and it was a good one too. Many others came after, each holding on to the tail of the one before it like a string of circus elephants." Pyper is at his best when he simply writes about what he loves and knows rather than when he attempts voices too strange or situations too dark. Kiss Me holds up over time and not just as the first book of a writer who has since moved on to write the best-selling novel Lost Girls. --Robyn Gillam

Lost Girls made Andrew Pyper a bonafide writing sensation. The audacious literary thriller catapulted to #1 on the National Post bestseller list and made the all-important Maclean’s list. Pyper’s reputation as a charismatic young writer capable of exploring serious contemporary issues and literary concerns of real importance has already been decidedly established. The addition of Kiss Me, Pyper’s earlier debut collection of short stories, in the popular PerennialCanada library, couldn’t be more timely.

Like Lost Girls, Kiss Me’s 13 short stories received instant praise, with one critic identifying Pyper as “the next major voice in Canadian literature.” These are stories of a twentysomething generation, growing up in the small towns and cities of Canada, now confronting the universal dilemmas of life in the real world.No tidy coming-of-age collection, Pyper’s stories are populated with characters who struggle to reach out—sometimes painfully, sometimes comically, and not always successfully—to make sense of their seemingly fractured condition in an equally disaffected universe. First love, first lust, first high, first terrible moment of awareness that in a single moment, life can change forever—this is shimmering, profound writing that moves from subtly detailed moments of awakening to often brutally shattering epiphanies.


It is, truly, an astonishing piece of work.” —The Globe and Mail

“Andrew Pyper has words in his blood.”

ANDREW PYPER is the author of Lost Girls, his highly acclaimed first novel that was a bestseller in Canada, in the Top 10 on the TimesUK paperback list and in the Top 30 of The New York Times paperback bestseller list. The novel was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail and The New York Times and is currently being adapted for the screen. His second novel, The Trade Mission, was selected as a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by the Toronto Star and was published in Canada, the US and the UK to great acclaim. Pyper is also theauthor of Kiss Me, a collection of short stories. While researching and writing The Wildfire Season, he spent three of the past five summers living in the Yukon. His home is in Toronto. Visit his website at andrewpyper.com.