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: January 2011
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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

Animated Trailer

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 (right side) to advance the slide show. Click left side to go back. Click off the picture to stop the show.

Excerpt: chapter 1, Handful of Nails

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