"I could say that my boyfriend beats me, but I prefer to call them fights. Fights he wins, of course, but that's still the way I see them." An X-ray technician takes a long, hard look at her abusive relationship.

The thirteen stories in Andrew Pyper's intense and artful short-story collection, Kiss Me, deal with the issues, sensibilities and intangible estrangements of contemporary youth. But there are no neat and tidy coming-of-age passages here: these are narratives about reaching out—and often failing to touch—one another in a time of both privilege and fracture.

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