Gritty short stories from the 1990s about listless twenty-somethings before they became known as Gen X. 

Andrew Pyper was known for his celebrated horror and mystery novels such as The Demonologist, The Damned, and The Killing Circle, but the thirteen stories in his debut collection, Kiss Me, first published in 1996, depict a grittier side to his writing, focusing on wistful portraits of a generation's emotional condition.

Written while he was bored in law school, these are stark, deadpan stories of a twenty-something generation 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. These are stories about reaching out but often failing to touch one another, from a time of both privilege and fracture.