Stories Teens Love

A moth dries itself against the screen, its wings opening like wet paper. Across the yard, the tomatoes split beneath their own weight. By morning, the ants have found the sweetness and carried it into the earth.

I've always liked how little John Cheever needs to tell a story. “Reunion” is maybe four pages long, and almost nothing happens in it. A boy meets his father for lunch, they go to a few restaurants, and then the boy leaves. They don't even manage to eat anything. It's a remarkably uneventful story, at least when you describe it like that. But I think Cheever understands something about the way we remember people, particularly people we love, that would be difficult to communi

I think utopias are made to be suspicious. There's something vaguely unsettling about a place where everyone is happy, the weather is agreeable, and nobody appears to have any serious complaints about the government. Perhaps this is simply a failure of imagination on my part, but I cannot read about a perfect society without immediately wondering where the garbage goes, who cleans the bathrooms, and whether somebody, somewhere, is having a particularly miserable time. Ursula

I don't know if I particularly like Flannery O'Connor's characters. There's something almost aggressively unpleasant about them, something that makes reading her stories feel a little like being trapped at a family dinner with people you can't stand. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the grandmother is vain, irritating, and almost impressively oblivious. The children are awful. The parents aren't much better. For the first half of the story, I found myself wondering why O'Conn

There is something particularly awful about two people who know each other very well becoming strangers. I think most of us imagine the end of a relationship as some tremendous, definitive event: an argument, a betrayal, somebody packing a suitcase and leaving in the middle of the night. But what happens when there is no great argument? When two people continue to live in the same house, eat at the same table, and sleep in the same bed, yet find themselves unable to say anyth

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s strange and tender first feature, is about miracles. Rather than asking if the miraculous can exist in an ordinary world, however, Bustillo examines almost the opposite possibility: that miracles may be everywhere in ordinary life, and are only obscured by our own unwillingness to notice them. Rita Lopez, our film’s main character, doesn’t seem particularly miraculous. She’s old, stubborn, devoutly Catholic, and spends m

The juxtaposition of characters in this story is what I found interesting here, on a first read. A generational conflict, for one: here is a man acting like a boy, and a boy trying to act like a man. The internal conflict within Sturgeon juxtaposed with the conflicts he undergoes throughout the narrative with his father. The starkness of these two moral battlefronts that the men find themselves on. Against the backdrop of the Million Man March- a gathering for Black men to pr

I chose this poem, mistakenly believing that somewhere in the body of the text, it referred to New Year’s. Ah, well. There is no reference to New Year’s, in this Terrance Hayes poem, but there is an unmistakable feeling of newness. Which is why I love poetry, for its ability to implicate, maybe, at even greater degree than fiction. Everything is implied. Which is why it’s sort of a miracle that a couple of lines and stanzas, a handful of words, can impart anything at all. Bu

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 human language we are accustomed to. And yet Dubus manages it. The story's premise is this: Catholic man loves his daughter. His daughter accidentally kills someone. The Catholic man covers it up. Terrible, eh? At least one would think so, when removed from the particulars of language and detail and the way the story is told. That's the ni

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 executes it so well. Here’s the premise: a man must drive both his girlfriend and her ex-husband to the jail, where he will serve a year for robbing a convenience store. Sweethearts observes what binds people. Even if they are not technical, legal bindings- like the binding of a girlfriend and a boyfriend, as opposed to her and ex-husband,

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...