Kiss Me, Stranger, Ron Tanner's illustrated novel, is a marvel of invention and vision as it follows the fate of a mother and her fourteen children in a small war-torn nation built on landfill.
Pub date: February 2011
Reviews & Press about Kiss Me, Stranger.
Animated trailer.
Read an excerpt.
Buy a signed copy of this book!
Slide show preview of the art.
The making of the animated trailer.
Link to IG Publishing.
Facebook page -- show your support!.
Reading Tour
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
Slide Show:
Illustrations drawn
by Penelope's fourteen children, ages 2-17;
propaganda and advertisements courtesy of
the Bureau of Cultural Treasures
Click each picture for an enlargement. Click the enlargement (upper right) to advance.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Making of the Kiss-Me-Stranger Animated Trailer:
Mary Marchand did the voice of Penelope, the novel's narrator. A professor of American literature at Goucher College, Mary knows how to read a story. Her gentle, well-modulated voice gives great depth to Penelope's character and, if I could, I'd channel it every time I read from the book.
"Through Jessica Blau and David Grossbach, I enlisted the help of five children at the Greenmount School to play the 14 children in the story. These kids were great -- attentive and quick studies. I had to teach them four verses to the children's quirky song, without music, and they had it down in ten minutes.
David Smooke -- renowned composer and (official) Schoenhut toy piano artist -- generously agreed to write an original score for the trailer. His music has been described as "wild, unsettling, spine-tingle . . . [with] a yummy, curdly tonality." David often performs with his trio THUNKsqwak. You can listen to the complete Kiss Me, Stranger Suite here.
<< roll-over image
Some readers have asked about the origins of some images in the book. I ranged widely for models and a few a kind of jokes. the girl in the window of the row house is Ella, the daughter of Jessica Blau and David Grossbach. The villain of the story -- the Metal Man -- is a modeled after a famous actor (still alive but quite old now). The trailer shows the clue. The drawing of the man pointing the gun in the trailer (which is not in the book) is modeled after Ian Fleming. The cathedral (in the book, not shown in the trailer) I modeled after a protestant church, not a cathedral, in another country. The landfill I just made up.
This was my first foray into animation, so I ended up doing it the hard way -- drawing panel by panel in Photoshop, then transferring each panel into Adobe Premiere Elements to make the movie. My computer didn't have enough RAM and so Elements kept crashing it (video eats lots of memory). It was a painfully slow process. But it was also lots of fun bringing the world of the book alive in film.
The Kiss Me Stranger Reading Tour |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reviews & Interviews about Kiss Me, Stranger>>
