My romance with Chicken Soup for the Soul began and ended with the adolescent iteration, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, and it was fostered in part because I read it when I was not yet teenaged. There was so much in that book for a 10-year-old to love: the amazing celebrity contributors (Jennifer Love Hewitt!), the interspersed cartoons, the bounty and variety of quotes, poems, and short stories. The collection was an emotional feast, with courses titled “Please Listen”—“When I ask you to listen to me/ and you begin to tell me why/ I shouldn’t feel that way,/ you are trampling on my feelings”—and “She Told Me It Was OK to Cry.” (@SavedYouAClick for all Chicken Soup books: It is always OK to cry.) I remember, at night, wanting to stop reading but not quite being able to—the anthology became a proto-Netflix binge-read, one chapter gliding seamlessly into the next. Together these maudlin snapshots contained every cliché of adolescence: the all-important school dance, the butterflies around a crush, the sleepovers and hours-long phone calls, the ever-present threat of humiliation (not even a threat, really, but a shimmer of low-level atmospherics, as if embarrassment were the musical key in which your experiences were scored). Continue reading at 'Slate'
[ Slate | 2014-11-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Thu, 28/07/2011 - 08:37 BBC Radio 4 seems to have performed a partial u-turn on its decision to cut the number of short stories it airs from three to one per week, with a compromise of two weekly broadcasts. Listeners, authors and celebrities such as... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-07-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this