For Anyone Who's Ever Been a Teenager Who's teenage years weren't terrible? Remember the scary older kids? The sadistic gym teacher? The smelly kid who sat next to you in science class? Your first fumbling kiss? That time you threw up in the cafeteria? Your first attempt at putting on a condom? The period that arrived unexpectedly? That awful fight with your parents? The first time you got drunk? That note you wrote that you shouldn't have written? The day you forgot to zip your fly? That monster zit? When, you wondered, would it all end? In When I Was a Loser, John McNally, author of the novel America's Report Card, assembles twenty-five original essays--often hilarious, sometimes tenderhearted, always evocative--about defining moments of high school loserdom. Brad Land, Julianna Baggott, Owen King, Johanna Edwards, and many more fresh, talented writers explore their own angst, humiliation, heartache, and other staples of teen life. These essays perfectly capture what it was like to be in high school: to experience so many things for the first time, to assert independence while desperately trying to fit in, to feel misunderstood and unable to articulate the wild swings between heartbreak, anger, and euphoria. One writer recalls how his grandmother helped him with his home perm in preparation for the Senior Class picture; another recounts her discovery, sometime after hitting puberty, of the power she held over boys and men, while at the same time she felt herself at their mercy; a third remembers the casual cruelties visited on him by the cooler kids, and the cruelties he, in turn, inflicted on kids below him on the social ladder. Utterly candid and compulsively readable, these essays conjure up and untangle those raw and formative years. The writers cringe and laugh at the teenagers they were, but at the same time, they honor their adolescence and the way it shaped their lives. Because, in truth, beneath the layers of adult respectability, we all still carry a little bit of our teenage selves around with us.
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Similarly , Nadja in " Word for Word " is reluctant to call Mr. Frankel by his first name , Ludwig , an act which would signal an acceptance of his appropriateness for her , since Ludwig — like Robert , Ernst , Fritz , Erich , Franz ...
Ellen went to Mrs. Donahue's house for help and Pius was soon hurrying to St. Lucy to telephone for a doctor. When Pius returned he brought the Carriers who remained all night. Bill and Pius helped the doctor set the bone and bind in ...
The mother was on Donahue. 60 Minutes did the doc and they'll repeat the news at ten. People dying, people killing, people crying— you can see it all on TV. Reality is really on TV. It's just another way to see— starvation in North ...
Philip P. Wiener . New York : Charles Scribner's Sons , 1973 . Plato . Plato : The Symposium . Trans . and ed . Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff . Indianapolis : Hackett Publishing Company , 1989 . Plummer , Kenneth , ed .
When the credits started to roll and Carmen, needing her meds and cigarettes, handed Ryan her car keys, Mary Ellen stared in disbelief. “She's giving him her keys!” she thought, eyeing Pepe, trying to catch his attention because he knew ...
Here she debuts a provocative new story written especially for this series.
We make our way slowly into the assembly hall, where 26 identical pillars cut from one rock line the sides. A fat stupa cut of the same rock stands at the innermost part of the hall; 20 feet high, it's shaped like an overturned bowl ...
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Everyone seems to have got something out of the speeches, the Metaphysical Revolution was declared, and Shelley's wind is now scattering “sparks, my words among mankind” (the passage Kathleen Raine quoted). We now hope it translates ...