High School Romance

by Marston Hefner

Overview

In his debut collection, Marston Hefner brings a unique voice and playful style to meditations on self-acceptance, the folly of youth, and how love can lead to actualization and destruction. 

Through moments of family intimacy, work presentations, vacations, doomed relationships, or businessmen chasing the ephemeral, Hefner shows we are lovable and acceptable despite the shame we accumulate through the years. Sometimes it’s only through stories that we can make sense of who we are and where we are going.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781955904056
Publisher:	CLASH Books
Publication date:	08/30/2022
Pages:	94
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Marston Hefner is the editor and founder of Young Magazine, a professional backgammon player, and has published work in New York Tyrant. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he prefers staying in, playing videogames, and reading indie lit over the nightlife and the glamor.

Editorial Reviews

09/05/2022

Debut author Hefner alternates from aggressiveness to vulnerable displays of emotion in this striking flash fiction exploration of romantic relationships, often with illicit or taboo dynamics. In “Dog Story,” the narrator claims that in the future, heteronormative relationships will have less primacy than people having sex with dogs. “The Moon Is a Tapestry, a Nightmare” features a narrator whose partner is cheating on him with Elon Musk, prompting him to make self-deprecating comparisons to the space-traveling industrialist (“so you fuck elon on the moon. his brain brought us here and i dont have elons sexual prowess or brain which is now something you know”). Notes of bile inflect much of the stories, followed by absurdist turns (“i start to make a spaceship in the mess hall with paper cups and string,” the Elon-cuckolded narrator continues). The brevity of each piece leaves the reader few opportunities to linger on the uncomfortable situations, which culminate in a sense that Hefner is just scratching the surface. Still, he emerges as a distinctive stylist. Fans of alt-lit will appreciate this. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Debut author Hefner alternates from aggressiveness to vulnerable displays of emotion in this striking flash fiction exploration of romantic relationships, often with illicit or taboo dynamics.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Marston Hefner strums the language in tunings all his own. His sentences dare themselves forward and backward into eddies of the purest impurities. No one writes more thunderstrikingly of filiality gone berserk. High School Romance is the debut of a vital and long overdue new voice.”

— GARIELLE LUTZ, author of WORSTED

“Marston has a singular voice cleaved from concentration like the knuckled work of a monk. You will learn about yourself as you delve into these stories.”

— ELLE NASH, author of NUDES, ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER, & GAG REFLEX

“Equally charming and unhinged, the stories in Marston Hefner's High School Romance will twist you into a bundle of giggly nerves.”

— BRIAN ALLEN CARR, OPIOID INDIANA

“Marston Hefner's High School Romance is a resounding answer to a pervasive ennui. Contemplative reverie and tactility of thought, that interiority scooped gleefully inside out is his lovesick signature, his lyrical sense of daring, giving passage to a raging river of intrusive thoughts, obsessive preoccupations, shattering stream of consciousness memories. A gloriously voluptuous vision, an unbearably hilarious anti-book, a marker as Hefner is an unlikely forerunner in a new kind of confessional.”

— MANUEL MARRERO, EXPAT PRESS

From the Publisher