In his debut collection, Marston Hefner brings a unique voice and playful style to meditations on self-acceptance, the folly of youth, and how love can lead to actualization and destruction.

Through moments of family intimacy, work presentations, vacations, doomed relationships, or businessmen chasing the ephemeral, Hefner shows we are lovable and acceptable despite the shame we accumulate through the years. Sometimes it’s only through stories that we can make sense of who we are and where we are going.

PRAISE FOR

HIGH SCHOOL ROMANCE

"Debut author Hefner alternates from aggressiveness to vulnerable displays of emotion in this striking flash fiction exploration of romantic relationships, often with illicit or taboo dynamics.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Marston Hefner strums the language in tunings all his own. His sentences dare themselves forward and backward into eddies of the purest impurities. No one writes more thunderstrikingly of filiality gone berserk. High School Romance is the debut of a vital and long overdue new voice.”

— GARIELLE LUTZ, author of WORSTED

“Equally charming and unhinged, the stories in Marston Hefner's High School Romance will twist you into a bundle of giggly nerves.”

— BRIAN ALLEN CARR, author of OPIOID INDIANA

“Marston Hefner's High School Romance is a resounding answer to a pervasive ennui. Contemplative reverie and tactility of thought, that interiority scooped gleefully inside out is his lovesick signature, his lyrical sense of daring, giving passage to a raging river of intrusive thoughts, obsessive preoccupations, shattering stream of consciousness memories. A gloriously voluptuous vision, an unbearably hilarious anti-book, a marker as Hefner is an unlikely forerunner in a new kind of confessional.”

— MANUEL MARRERO, EXPAT PRESS

MARSTON HEFNER continues the legacy Hugh Hefner left him, exploring sexual taboos, finding radical self-love in humanity’s darkest unconscious desires. He is the editor and founder of Young Magazine, a professional backgammon player, and has published work in New York Tyrant. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he prefers staying in, playing videogames, and reading over the nightlife and the glamor.

ISBN: 9781955904056