Stories Teens Love

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