One of the more interesting ways Larry Doyle found to promote his debut novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper, which is sorta like Superbad but leaning a little heavier on the slapstick violence and ironic humor, was an essay contest featuring “your best of days, your worst of nights, your most mind-blasting, soul-crushing, thrilling, terrorizing, delightful and humiliating memories of high school.” The winner has been chosen: “Eat or Die,” a mini-memoir by Jonathan Selwood (whose The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse), coincidentally, just came out from another division of the conglomerate that published Doyle’s novel). It’s like what “Modern Love” would be like it were anthropomorphized enough to go on a bender, as Selwood snags an iPod by recounting how he went to Spain on an exchange program and got caught fooling around with a local girl, which resulted in her family feeding him exquisite local cuisine for two hours straight. (There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation; really there is.)
Other writers who made the longlist, and whose stories all appear on the website, include Kristen Buckley, Nicholas Kulish, Amy Bryant, Karen Quinn, Leslie Margolis, Jamie Malanowski, Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Kurt Andersen, and Laura Zigman. And those are just the names I recognize—apologies if I left anybody out!