Jean Stafford writes about youth in such perfect and succinct ways throughout many of these stories. My favorite of the whole bunch, and one you should check out is “Bad Characters” which starts off with the young narrator describing how she has these intense fractured and debased friendships (she’s 13 or so) in these short frenetic periods of time and then she’s quickly and thoroughly dispatched from their lives. From there, she moves on. Then, she meets her match and has a devastatingly intense (and […]