You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

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Kristen Roupenian writes as though wielding a scalpel, as she delicately exposes the rot that lurks just beneath polite society. Despite varying degrees of obliviousness, her characters are each articulate in their downfall, collectively undone by their curdled desires. Beautiful, horrifying, and wincingly funny, this book glitters with malice — I couldn’t look away and I didn’t want to. You Know You Want This is the way a writer’s career begins: not with a whimper but a bang. Recommended By Lauren P., Powells.com

From the author of “Cat Person” — “the short story that launched a thousand theories” (The Guardian) — comes Kristen Roupenian's highly anticipated debut, a compulsively readable collection of short stories that explore the complex — and often darkly funny — connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.

You Know You Want This brilliantly explores the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex… until they can’t have sex without him; a 10-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean”; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter” who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.

Spanning a range of genres and topics — from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural — these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable — or worse, understood — as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.”

"If you think you know what this collection will be like, you’re wrong. These stories are sharp and perverse, dark and bizarre, unrelenting and utterly bananas. I love them so, so much." Carmen Maria Machado, National Book Award Finalist and author of Her Body and Other Parties

"In an age that needs a wrecking ball You Know You Want This provides one. This is a raucous, visceral page-turner that tunnels into the heart of relationships gone awry, modern-day miscommunications, and other horrors of being human. Not polite. Suffers no fools. Takes no prisoners. Read it." Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation

"It's unheard of for a short story to go viral, but 'Cat Person' — through a combination of impossibly sharp writing and impossibly good timing — had done it. A year later, Roupenian's debut collection proves that success wasn't a fluke. The 12 visceral stories here range from uncomfortable to truly horrifying and are often — though not always — focused on the vicious contradictions of being female… Unsettling, memorable, and — maybe perversely — very, very fun." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"There is always some anxiety following such a short, steep rise to recognition, but in this collection Roupenian lives up to those high expectations. The stories are wonderfully varied in execution, from realist to surreal, staying fresh while circling one primary concern: how men and women relate to one another, and how often that relationship can go wrong." Vanity Fair

Kristen Roupenian graduated from Barnard College and holds a PhD in English from Harvard, as well as an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of the short story, “Cat Person,” which was published in The New Yorker and selected by Sheila Heti for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018. She is currently at work on a novel.

There was a point in my life, not very long ago, when the only kind of movies I wanted to watch were horror movies. The Purge, Paranormal Activity, Honeymoon, The Conjuring, Wolf Creek, It Follows. Slasher films and haunted house stories, feminist revisions of the genre and the bloodiest, most pointlessly misogynistic garbage...

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