Our first thought about the new book The Worst Years of Your Life was, How do they know what the worst years were?
But this collection of 20 short stories is way ahead of us. The subtitle is "Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us." It was edited by novelist and screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier and includes classics such as "Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth as well as stories by Jennifer Egan, A.M. Homes, and Nathan Englander. Poirier himself contributes a painfully funny piece called "Thunderbird."
Perhaps it's unnecessary to describe it as 'painfully funny'. That's the whole territory: the painful part is a given, and the funny part -- well, that's a question of time, distance, and degree.
written on Tuesday Sep 18, 2007
acne,
sex,
book.
