Stripping + Other Stories (High Risk Books) [Paperback]

Pagan Kennedy (Author)

Book Description

Series: High Risk Books | Publication Date: February 1, 1993

Plunges the reader into a world of dark and haunting visions by laying bare the lives of females who exist on the fringes - punk teenagers, voodoo queens, academic losers. This collection of short stories mirrors the fragility of lives rooted in the virtual reality of modern America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this impressive first collection, Kennedy presents a series of quirky but likable girls and women. They are tomboys and daredevils, women who almost get the upper hand with the people (especially men) around them, only to quickly lose hold. A girl at camp submits to others' attempts to make her over, goes to a dance, and ends up with a boy who describes himself as "socially retarded." A 70-year-old woman meets her cousin for the first time in years, in the hopes he too will recall the day, 57 years ago, when his older brother raped her. The common thread all Kennedy's female characters share is their desire to be good girls, to do as their mothers would wish them to. One seven-year-old narrator goes so far in her efforts to please others that she submits to phone sex with an anonymous caller. "Her mother gave her real pills, too: purple ones for going to sleep; a yellow one to ease her through the first day of third grade; a white one when she got too excited about riding the bumper cars at Playland," another protagonist recounts. Deftly detailing their gestures and physical transformations, Kennedy ensures that her characters' turmoils will seem hauntingly familiar to readers.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Kennedy's tales reduce her characters' lives to their naked realities, warts and all. We meet an odd assortment of life's outsiders, such as, in the title story, an orderly, retired schoolmarm reminding her cousin of one childhood summer when his brother raped her and he watched, only to invent their shared past as a comfort to him and, perhaps, herself: "It was me; I took my own clothes off for him. . . . I was a wild little thing. And when I die, I don't want them to tuck a sheet over me like making a clean bed and think I never had my sins." There are also a punk queen obsessed with visiting the bathroom in which Elvis died in order to fathom the secrets of the supernatural; a nerdy math whiz desperately trying to fit in with her more worldly peers at camp and become a "fallen woman"; and a college freshman renouncing her "Protestant childhood of hot baths and horseback riding" for Nietzsche. Yet in the midst of her voodoo queens and UFOs carrying Love Universe aliens, Kennedy reminds us of our common humanity. Whitney Scott

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail; 1ST edition (February 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852423226
• ISBN-13: 978-1852423223
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,994,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars stripping is anything but normal, July 18, 2000

By 

"celstialjenn" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stripping + Other Stories (High Risk Books) (Paperback)

Stripping is a collection of stories about women who somehow didn't fit into society for whatever reason, be it that they were too intelligent, raped, too neurotic, etc. I loved it because of the attention to detail given to each story, and the authentic voice that each character has. My favorite story was the 1st in the book about the girl who develops an obsession with the death of Elvis. Each of the short stories will affect you in some way, and make this a book you won't forget.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars plastik jive and cherub scribble, July 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Stripping + Other Stories (High Risk Books) (Paperback)

This is the best of Pagan Kennedy's books. It has a bunch of short stories that are interesting as well as weird. She doesn't simply redo old themes, she has her own brain, and she's not afraid to use it.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Boring & predictable, May 30, 2000

By 

Kari Whiatt - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stripping + Other Stories (High Risk Books) (Paperback)

There is exactly one interesting, original story in this collection, and that's the one about the girl obsessed with the skeleton she knows is under her skin. The rest is just utterly boring and of that pseudo-profundity & pretentiousness you display when you're about 14 and really really lonely. For chrissakes, about half of the stories deal with that loss of innocence (or whatever) you experience when you find out that your parents are not omniscient after all - do we really need this? What's worse, the other half just plods along for a handful of pages, going nowhere. I guess it's not so bad when you come across one of these stories in a magazine or whatever, but putting them all in a book just is not a good idea.