Love & Profanity: A Collection of True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, Concise, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life

by Rachael Hanel, Geoff Herbach, Kasandra Duthie, Anna Vodicka, Sarah Childers

Overview

Love & Profanity features more than forty brief, brilliant, and unforgettable true stories from writers both renowned and on the rise. Discover strange and surprising scenes of people coming of age amidst the everyday intensity of teenage life. Witness transformative moments arising from the mundane. Behold the young adult in full splendor and horror, bursting with love and profanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630790288
Publisher:	Capstone
Publication date:	01/07/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Geoff Herbach’s young adult novels, Stupid Fast, Nothing Special, I’m With Stupid, and Fat Boy vs. The Cheerleaders, have been listed in the year’s best by many associations who seem to know what they’re talking about. Prior to writing YA, he published a literary novel, The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg, wrote comedic radio and stage shows, and traveled the country telling weird stories in rock clubs. He teaches creative writing at Minnesota State, Mankato, and lives in a log cabin with a very tall wife named Steph.
Clint Edwards hasn’t crapped his pants since freshman year, but tomorrow is another day. You can read more about Clint at No Idea What I’m Doing: A Daddy Blog. It’s been featured on Good Morning America, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. But that’s not the real reason to read it. The real reason is that it will give you a glimpse into the steamy world of adult married life with children, and because he sometimes writes about farts.
Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota, and her writing about that experience has appeared in various publications. She changed schools in seventh grade but survived
Jessica Gunderson grew up in the small town of Washburn, North Dakota. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Dakota and an MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. She has written more than fifty books for young readers. Her book Ropes of Revolution won the 2008 Moonbeam Award for best graphic novel. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and cat.
Steve Brezenoff is the author of more than fifty middle-grade chapter books, including the Field Trip Mysteries series, the Ravens Pass series of thrillers, and the Return to the Titanic series. He's also written three young-adult novels, Guy in Real Life; Brooklyn, Burning; and The Absolute Value of -1. In his spare time, he enjoys video games, cycling, and cooking. Steve lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Beth, and their son and daughter. .

Editorial Reviews

Featuring such YA authors as Carrie Mesrobian, Steve Brezenoff, Pete Hautman, and Joseph Bruchac, the stories are painful, humorous, embarrassing, nostalgic, and insightful.

Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book

Moments of exhilaration and humiliation, narrow escapes, and epiphanies that opened their eyes and ended their childhoods are all given the significance of hindsight. . . .the authors, perhaps because they are working with true stories from their own pasts, show admirable restraint and reveal not how edgy but how nerdy and ordinary many YA authors were as teens. Sure to give hope to aspiring writers, then, this collection offers models for how ordinary moments turn into stories, and ordinary kids turn into storytellers.

Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

Each story takes only a few minutes or less to read, but they linger in the mind for much longer, offering sharp, fresh perspectives on the kinds of experiences that, for teens, are both commonplace and life-changing — the kinds of experiences that, in editor Nick Healy's words, "define and explain ourselves."

"Young adult roundup: 'Love & Profanity' and Chicago Tribune

From the title and cover I did not know that this book would be one of the sweetest and most terrifyingly authentic things I've read. None of the stories were groundbreaking or shocking; they were simply beautiful and honest. . . .undeniably genuine and heartfelt stories — teen readers, give them a try!

TeenReads.com/The Book Report

These well-written and intensely personal reminiscences are often raw and gritty, exposing the realistic, and not always admirable, behavior of typical adolescents. Both the realism of the vignettes and their shortness will appeal to reluctant readers, as well as creative writing teachers needing prompts.

VOYA

...relentlessly fascinating brief true stories from YA writers about their own teen years. . . .it’s irresistible…

"5 young-adult books by Minnesota writers" Star Tribune

...concise and punchy. . . .the brevity of the stories, the honesty of their authors, and their tidy organization lend themselves well to browsing, increasing the likelihood that teen readers will find something they connect with.

Booklist

2014-12-06
Each of these 40-plus very short stories unveils a memory of being a teenager that is important to its respective writer.Markedly brief offerings from authors both well-known and less familiar make for an unusual and interesting read that is enormously successful in illustrating how different the lives of teens are from one another. For example, though they seem to involve a similar event, Geoff Herbach's ultimately haunting tale of being mistaken for a girl's tormentor after he ditches empty beer bottles left in his car in the wrong spot couldn't be more different from Carrie Mesrobian's wryly funny recollection of her panic at finding a spent party ball stashed in her family's board-game cupboard weeks after an illicit party at her house. Such issues as body image, cliques, family strife, economic status and popularity are recurring themes throughout and will resonate with teen readers. Less likely to do so are details such as listening to music on Discmans and watching MTV with VHS tapes at the ready to record a favorite video or playing pinball and drinking vodka-spiked Fresca. Teens who enjoy slice-of-life vignettes that evoke a specific time and place and adults who thrill to nostalgia will find a lot to like about these pithy, honestly awkward and poignant minimemoirs. (Memoir. 14 & up)

Kirkus Reviews