Stories Teens Love

Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus and most lucrative franchise. I love Kojima as much as any game lover—liker, even—would love him and maybe any writer might distrust him, if only to say that I love him recklessly and, despite my better judgement, love MGS’s storyline as well. There isn’t much you need to know about the games in order to enjoy this piece to some meaningful extent; what’s necessary to divulge I will, and will try to keep brief. All this is to say th

Writing about chess is almost impossible because it already comes preloaded with meaning. The board is a built-in metaphor, and because all these beautiful metaphors have already been exhaustively made, the best stories about chess can never be much about the game at all. The board can really only be a jumping-off point: we may immerse ourselves in it as any setup may allow us, any world that promises structure and consequence, but from there it is the author’s purview to tak

Today's short story is a much-anthologized one: the famous "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. Any lover of short stories will likely...

I am fascinated by this story because it includes a dialogue between two beings, one of who, in theory, cannot speak. Or at least in the...

There is a great deal I love about Sonny’s Blues. It is an oft-anthologized story, for its themes and its power, but it’s a story that...

A great Hemingway short story. It’s very simple, but it encapsulates for me very simply what Hemingway’s core themes are- real and...

Probably the oldest story we've covered on the website so far, and so I approach it a little differently. I read this story a little less...

All I can really think about for this short story is how this is a great premise for a short story. Truly. It’s so simple, and yet Ford...

Another one of my all-time favorites. Karen Russell isn’t an author I reach for frequently, but this story is an all-time great. It’s...

Another one of the great Amy Hempel’s short stories. She’s one of my favorite short story writers, in the sense that you always remember...

A very famously anthologized short story, and for good reason. It’s the first short story I remember reading and loving, very intensely,...

This is also a pretty prototypical Carver story. You’ve got the hallmarks of what he became so famous for- failed marriage, alcoholism, a...

This story is a strange one. I’ll admit that I don’t quite know how to categorize Mavis Gallant’s work. It has the sharpness of...

Often, when I’m writing and meditating about these stories I love, it’s often hard for me to come up with anything original to say about...

What a class gerbil and a class orphan might have in common Once, on a train ride, I couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi and had forgotten,...

Another Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie story. I really love her, and her work. “Cell One” was great and pitch-perfect. Apollo does something a...

Today’s story is another story that kind of defies logic. I can’t trap the underpinnings of exactly why I love this story so much. I...

I’ll be honest- I never really loved Denis Johnson.  Not in the way I guess writers are supposed to love Denis Johnson. My friends who...

While she’s probably best known as a novelist, I think Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short stories are really something special. I have a...

Ah. One of Raymond Carver’s finest.  Carver is an enamoring writer because I feel as though I’ve read him everywhere, in books that...