The Kissing List

Reents’s collection is formally adept—one story in which a woman trades sex for designer clothes moves seamlessly into another that begins with an ill-fitting and outdated suit worn to a temp job. Despite the pleasing transitions, however, the entire volume is infused with a melancholic wistfulness that can come off as self-indulgent, and the weakest stories tend to be shallow and predictable. The stories form a patchwork of the lives of friends and acquaintances in New York, told from different perspectives, which flesh out significant events—such as Laurie’s cancer, or the ever-changing landscape of Sylvia’s love life. Reents uses the myriad viewpoints and freedom of the short format to play with different styles and forms, but the whole is cohesive. “Roommates,” for example, is a traditional, realist narrative, but Reents experiments with surrealism (“Disquisition on Tears”) and a detached, third-person narrative that reinforces the notion of a diaspora of the self (“Love for Women”). If not exactly trailblazing, Reents has created a collection that is emotionally vivid and stylistically interesting. Agent: Emily Forland, the Wendy Weil Agency. (May)