I never learned who I was at Greenmeadow, but I learned something almost as valuable, which is who I was not: a genius.' Grossman wins the camp's 'Best Waiter' award, a sign that his career as a cellist was about to peak in high school: 'People say that going to camp is about growing up and learning who you are. It is favored by the faculty because they believe the game encourages a sense of rhythm. In 'Cello, Goodbye,' Lev Grossman describes a highly competitive music camp, Greenmeadow, where the sports offerings consist solely of pingpong. Margaret Atwood's haunting story, 'Death by Landscape,' deals with the memory of a camper who walks off into the woods and vanishes.

In Josh Lambert's 'The Brief Summer of Amir and Ariella An Allegory,' a counselor is seduced by a camper: 'the most perfect, the most perfectly impossible girl he will ever hold.'īut camp isn't all sex. In 'i like guys,' David Sedaris describes feeling his bunk bed 'buck and swaying,' knowing that his roommate 'was either masturbating or beating eggs for an omelet.' That's true at a fat camp, where all the counselors have beautiful bodies in Kevin Canty's 'Flipper,' and at the Texas Lions' Camp for Crippled Children, where the poolside heartthrob is the Deep End Instructor in Terry Galloway's 'The Performance of Drowning.'Īs editor Eric Simonoff writes, 'Far from home, removed from the constraints of school, camp offers a rare opportunity for reinvention, a relatively safe atmosphere for the defiance of authority, and, what with the heat, the lake, the pool, the ceaseless chirping of bugs, and the sleeping arrangements, opportunities for exquisite sexual tension and exploration.' It's an edgy, eclectic collection of 20 essays and short stories by talented writers, many of whom focus on unauthorized camp activities, including sex, or at least the thought of it.

The American Camping Association won't be endorsing Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp.

Sleepaway by Eric Simonoff