Kiss Me, Stranger: An Illustrated Novel and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more



or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Start reading Kiss Me, Stranger: An Illustrated Novel on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

Kiss Me, Stranger: An Illustrated Novel [Paperback]

Ron Tanner
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)

Price: $14.95 & FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Only 1 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it tomorrow, May 21? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition $9.99  
Paperback $14.95  
Image
Save on Popular Books This Summer
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more.

Book Description

February 8, 2011
Set in an unnamed country built on landfill -- situated sometime in the past, present, or future -- Kiss Me, Stranger is the story of one woman's attempts to keep her family together while a civil war rages around her. Featuring illustrations by the author, Kiss Me, Stranger is a comical and tragic commentary on war, violence, and consumerism.

Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed


Editorial Reviews

Review



Brightly bleak and utterly human, Kiss Me Stranger is a sort of picture book for adults - it shimmers with imagery both verbal and visual, using satire and humor to bring home how much our modern world takes for granted.
--Foreword magazine

From the Back Cover

Here is a mordant romp, a ballad in the key of grit. Kiss Me, Stranger posits a cartoon future uncomfortably credible, in which scrap iron is more valuable than gold, rival militias are interchangeable, and the garbage rises to engulf us. How remarkable, then, that children, generosity, resilience, and love still tug at us in the old way. Bravo!
Janet Burroway, author of Bridge of Sand

Ron Tanner's amazing amalgam of a book, Kiss Me, Stranger, has done the impossible, namely, simultaneously alloying a dark dystopic landscape with a dreamy demonicly manic state of stone-cold wonderfulness. This book out-hybrids any hybrid you can imagine, cobbling it together (with shit-kicking genius) inside the gaping maw of awe, deep, deep in our big ol' oxygen starved brains. Stunning.
Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone

Ron Tanner has all the right wires crossed in his head, his imagination smoking, short-circuiting, his sentences snapping with a wild electricity in KISS ME STRANGER, a dystopic novel that reads like some wonderfully disturbed bastard child of Vonnegut and Orwell.
Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding; Refresh, Refresh; and The Language of Elk

Ron Tanner's KISS ME STRANGER would be remarkable for the eerie simplicity of the text alone, but his seemingly guileless illustrations flip this impressive book into another dimension, well outside the spectrum of post-apocalyptic narratives than runs from RIDDLEY WALKER to THE ROAD.
Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Devil's Dream

Beautiful and absurd, clever and inventive, Ron Tanner's speculative eco-fiction is a terrifying story for our times.
Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody

Product Details

  • Paperback: 184 pages
  • Publisher: Ig Publishing (February 8, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1935439170
  • ISBN-13: 978-1935439172
  • Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 7.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,055,628 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ron Tanner's awards for writing include a Faulkner Society gold medal, a Pushcart Prize, a New Letters Award, a Best of the Web Award, and many others. He has won fellowships from the Copernicus Society, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the National Park Service, to name a few, and his stories and essays have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including The Iowa Review, West Branch, and the Quarterly. His first collection of stories, A Bed of Nails, won both the G.S. Sharat Chandra award and the Towson Prize for Literature. Janet Burroway called it "fabulously imaginative, experimental, witty, often breathtaking."

Ron and his wife, Jill, live in a former fraternity house that they saved from ruin and renovated to its former Victorian glory. The house was featured in This Old House magazine. Ron has written about this adventure in his latest book, From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story , forthcoming from Academy Chicago Publishers. See more at http://Houselove.org.

Ron teaches writing at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland, and directs the Marshall Islands Story Project (http://mistories.org), which aims to preserve the story-telling culture of the Marshallese people.

For more visit Ron at http://ronaldtanner.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars ORIGINAL, FUN, FABULOUS and even a little scary! February 6, 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This illustrated novel is unlike anything I've ever read before. The drawings by the author are so cool--he can draw as well as he writes. There is no easy category for this book--it moves quickly, captures your imagination and even scares you a bit. I loved it!
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Tanner's book, despite it's dystopian setting, has an undeniable air of hope and perseverance. Although illustrated novels sometimes get a bad wrap, this novel is perfect to be illustrated. The drawings add humor and perception, as well as characterization. Its a genuinely fun read too - perfect for anyone looking for a good piece of literature to pass the time. For anyone who's ever been lucky enough to have Tanner for a professor, you should especially pick this on up. You'll see a lot of his personality in it.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars not for me May 5, 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
No name is ever given for the country in which she resides, nor is her name ever revealed, but the narrator of this story talks about her life as a mother and wife in a time when it seems the world is going to end. Turmoil is the state in which they live. Her husband and son have gone off to fight, but who knows which side they are fighting for, or which side is the right side. Will this family ever feel normal again?

I have never been one to read much, ok, any, dystopian fiction, so I am not sure if this book is representative of the genre. What I am sure of is that this book is totally bizarre, and in my opinion defies most rules of writing. The setting is never really set, the characters are never really developed, and the plot only sort of exists.

The book is described as an illustrated novel, and I find this to be a grave misnomer. The illustrations look like childish scribbles, and do not really add anything to the experience of the book. It reads more like a stream of consciousness exercise than an actual novel, though there is at least some resolution at the end of the book.

I think maybe I just did not "get" this book, because it has a lot of great reviews out there. But to me, it seemed as if this book was just trying too hard to be bold and artistic, to make a statement. The only statement I got from this book was "you get what you pay for", since I got it as a free download.
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars??? Please....
I have to wonder if all the five-star reviewers of this book are:

1) His Students (yes, students, I did notice you made sure to list your full names) and other... Read more
Published 12 months ago by T. P. Keeler
5.0 out of 5 stars dystopia and laughs
I tend not to be a fan of dystopic novels ( not sure why), but I loved this for all the humor and absurdity alongside the government critique. Read more
Published 17 months ago by D. Spark
4.0 out of 5 stars Kiss Me Stranger: A LitStack excerpt
Tanner's vision of everyone's probable future enjoys a dreamlike quality that is produced by an amplification of the symbols he employs. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Rob Vollmar
5.0 out of 5 stars Laughing through my tears
I have followed Ron Tanner's writing with interest for many years. Ron's quirky worldview, his unique artistic talents, and his sparse but humorous writing style combine to make... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Chip Poston
5.0 out of 5 stars Heartbreaking, inspirational, and not to be missed
I loved this book, for many reasons, but in particular, for the incredible insight Tanner has into his characters' psyches: the questions, the yearnings, the doubts and convictions... Read more
Published 23 months ago by A. Michel
1.0 out of 5 stars Just Horrible.
This book was just bad. The so called pictures gave nothing to writing, not to mention they were poorly done. They looked like something a young child would do in Paint. Read more
Published 24 months ago by Madine09
5.0 out of 5 stars good book from an inspiring role model
This is a fun, quick read. Pick it up when you need some catharsis from the evils of 21st-century life, and/or want to read about a society at war and crumbling. Read more
Published on May 20, 2011 by Kate
5.0 out of 5 stars A world too much like our own
KISS ME, STRANGER is one of the most inventive books I've read. Part dystopian fiction, part trenchant satire, part love story, and all bravado, this novel (or novella? Read more
Published on May 15, 2011 by Horace
5.0 out of 5 stars stranger in a strange world
very engaging and original - loved the illustrations. the characters were believable and well articulated - it was easy to visualize the subjects and subject matter in my mind. Read more
Published on May 12, 2011 by B. Bennett
5.0 out of 5 stars I really loved this book....
As an avid reader, I always begin every book with the hope that it will be "the" book. You know, that rare read that sucks you in from the very first sentence... Read more
Published on May 7, 2011 by J. Wahler
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Forums

There are no discussions about this product yet.
Be the first to discuss this product with the community.
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Listmania!


Create a Listmania! list

So You'd Like to...


Create a guide


Look for Similar Items by Category