Boychik Lit

Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of 2020 Independent Press Awards Distinguished Favorites Clifford's Spiral and Preacher Finds a Corpse. This short book has six stories and one essay. The essay "Boychik Lit" is the think piece, offering Gerald Everett Jones's thoughts on the genre which he named. "Chemistry" expands on the self-evident premise that you can't tell teenagers anything. The narrator of "Not Quite After Lisette is a forty-something high-tech executive whose wife is divorcing him. "Johnny Halo and Rock, the Tyro Shock Jock" is the first of three episodes from the Rollo Hemphill series of comic novels. In this installment, he falls upward into a job as a shock-jock deejay. "In the Valley of the Happy People" is from the second book, Rubber Babes, and "Spin Cycle" is a chapter from the third book, Farnsworth's Revenge: Rollo's End. "In the Gallery of American Art" is actually a story about a woman who wakes up on her birthday thinking her life is perfect. And of course it's not. It is excerpted from his novel Bonfire of the Vanderbilts.