NYTIMES Reviews Kristen Roupenion’s New Book (Kenya)

Sunday’s January 27, 2019 NYTIMES Book Review has a glowing review of Kristen Roupenian (Kenya 2003-05) new collection of stories, You Know You Want This. The review, done by author Lauren Holmes, writes about “A collection of dark tales from the author of the story ‘Cat Person.’

Of the 12 stories in Kristen’s debut book are considered “exciting, smart, perceptive, weird and dark.” For example: one story is about an increasingly precarious sex game, another about an 11-year-old’s birthday party gone wrong. There’s a princess fairy tale (and yes!) a guy in the Peace Corps who’s tormented by his students. That story, entitled ‘The Night Runner’ begins with this sentence: “The Class Six girls were bad, and everyone knew it.”

While Kristen is famous for “Cat Person” published in The New Yorker, that story in tone an approach is not unlike all the stories in this collection, which I have just read. As Lauren Holmes writes in her review, “What’s special about “Cat Person,” and the rest of the stories in You Know You Want This, is the author’s expert control of language, character, story — her ability to write stories that feel told, and yet so unpretentious and accessible that we think they must be true.”