Brendan Gillen is an Emmy-winning writer living in Brooklyn. His fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in Wigleaf, Taco Bell Quarterly, New Delta Review, HAD, X-R-A-Y, South Carolina Review and elsewhere. His debut chapbook is I've Given This a Lot of Thought, and his first novel Static.
At Electric Lit Gillen tagged eight "favorite books [that] deal with stealing in some capacity, or at the very least, getting the things you want by taking them from others." One title on the list:
Teenager by Bud SmithRead about the other entries on the list.
Teenager is much more than a road trip novel. In some ways, it’s the adolescent cousin of [Joy Williams's] Breaking & Entering. Trade a married couple and beach home B&E for a pair of Bonnie and Clyde-esque teenlovers and a healthy dose of grand theft auto, and you’re in the right area code.
Seventeen-year-old Kody Rawlee Green and his girlfriend Tella Carticelli, who he calls Teal Cartwheels, are the stars of the show. Within the first few pages, Kody escapes from juvenile detention, murders Teal’s parents to save her from abuse, steals a car and peels off with the love of his life in the passenger seat. From there, we’re off on a surreal journey across America following two teens whose trauma has forced them to grow up much too fast.
Teenager is about what it means to be an adolescent in all of its aching, yearning, idiocy and explosiveness. It’s about what happens when your heart writes checks that your brain can’t cash. The voice is unexpected, funny, full of pathos in every sentence. If you’re looking for plausible plot and hyper-real characters, look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for the truth about what it means to be young and wild and free and in love? Look no further.
--Marshal Zeringue
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