Teenagers

The debut novelist on the mercurial desires of teenage girls, the musicality of language, and embracing the digressive quality of the human mind.

The novelist on living in liminal spaces, Los Angeles in the `90s, and using Ponyboy as inspiration.

“Nothing you will see tonight is normal,” said Elihu’s mother. It was the first exciting thing she’d ever said. 

I caught Elma licking her front teeth in the rearview mirror. The gap between them seemed to be getting wider, like Jane Birkin, whose teeth spread considerably apart as she grew older, an oral Pangea situation. 

Rickie Vasquez is wondering if all you ever have to offer him are crumbs.

Brooklyn native Hittman on her deft portrayal of young “love” in her auspicious feature debut, It Felt Like Love.

Wolf, whose new film Teenage is out now, on the invention of the teenager and how our obsession with nostalgia may be helping our innovation.

Levi Rubeck on the perils of adolescence in Rebecca Wolff’s The Beginners.

Uncanny, maybe. Troublemakers for sure. Between reality and fiction, Rona Yefman’s Let It Bleed brings us the flawless collaboration between photographer and actor, in this case, the artist and her sibling Gil. 

There is something inexhaustible in Homer’s Odyssey that makes us want to go back to it, to the archetype of a hero’s going forth and arduous return, of bravery and cunning, and, finally, of the test of a wife’s fidelity. 

Heather McGowan’s Schooling is a coming-of-age tale with a sensitive, nubile protagonist, the kind of novel described by eager publicists as “luminous.” 

In his first New York solo show at 303 Gallery, the 26-year-old Canadian painter Tim Gardner works from his brothers’ and his own snapshots of their friends to create a vivid depiction of teenage male-bonding games glimpsed in the suburbs of Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. 

This prayer of lamentation—if you’ll forgive the use of those words—began the day we were camping at Sleeping Bear and Rondo went out trashed and got lost.

There was the time Jim Dill allowed his head to be used as a bong, but only by the girls. This was late into one of the infamous Forest Road cabin keg parties. 

Scene I. This could be a room in any corporate office. Dark red couches, strewn here and there like the small rugs below them, light up the grey of the walls.

This First Proof contains an excerpt from the novel The Keepsake.

DAVE: You’re fuckin’ up, man. 

What are you required to do at a stop sign?

The first thing I think when I wake up in the morning is how much I love school.