Life Lessons

by Stefan Merrill Block

From the critically acclaimed author of Oliver Loving and The Story of Forgetting is a short story about friendship, loss and growing up.
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Life the most soothing salve available to the man who has recently torched his own face is a regular application of wickedness with a pretty girl.
The choices we make can follow us, and when half of your face is torched you can't escape the past. As a freshman in college he meets friends and attends parties, red cup in tow. His face is a Rorschach test to his friends, though he'll never tell them what really happened.
In his group of friends there is Ava- sardonic, infatuating and alarmingly beautiful Ava. But he's too burnt up to be considered as anything more than a 'bestie' to a girl like her...

59 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 11, 2019

About the author

Stefan grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, The Ovid Prize from the Romanian Writer's Union, the 2008 Merck Serono Literature Prize and the 2009 Fiction Award from The Writers’ League of Texas. The Story of Forgetting was also a finalist for the debut fiction awards from IndieBound, Salon du Livre and The Center for Fiction. Following the publication of his second novel, The Storm at the Door, Stefan was awarded The University of Texas Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, as well as residencies at The Santa Maddalena Foundation and Castello Malaspina di Fosdinovo in Italy. Stefan's novels have been translated into ten languages, and his stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker Page-Turner, The Guardian, NPR’s Radiolab, GRANTA, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Stefan's third novel, Oliver Loving, is forthcoming from Macmillan/Flatiron Books. He lives in Brooklyn.