Staff Picks: Good Guys, Goose Fat, and Ghosts of Mars

Kristen Roupenian. Photo: Elisa Roupenian Toha.

There was a time when I found online dating apps addictive. It was a guiltless game: arbitrarily judging prospects by a series of photos, a far-fetched emoji or two, and a pickup line purloined from some seedy Internet forum. Does he like cilantro? (He should not.) Does he travel? (He should.) It’s no secret that the methods of modern romance have long been under fire. In retrospect, it’s equally unsurprising just how many people Kristen Roupenian’s “”—the story that inundated the Internet last December—resonated with. In that story, Roupenian shows she has a disconcertingly accurate eye for the ways we misjudge and miscommunicate our desires in today’s perfunctory dating culture, often to, is destined to be even more devastating. Roupenian sets the scene in “The Good Guy,” one of her eleven new stories in the collection: “It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.” Her characters verge on being uncomfortably relatable—trying to break up with someone in an Olive Garden, obsessing over whether bug bites are actually bug bites—before they start to spiral out of control in pursuit of humanity’s nastiest and most self-destructive pleasures. Each story is a refrain of the private indignities that keep you lying awake at night, the things that leave you wondering, Am I a good person, despite wanting what I want? With a wry voice and an all-knowing smirk, Roupenian lances through the sexual anxiety that permeates much of contemporary literature and society. Look at who you are, she dares us. “Look at what you’ve done.”