Eric Simonoff

It’s summer and while I am too old for summer camp, there is nothing stopping me from reading about it. It is for this reason that I picked up “Sleepaway”. Though I never attended a sleep-away camp, I knew that it would make me nostalgic for summer vacations. In that regard, it hit the spot!!

As the cover shows, this collection includes numerous famous authors as well as some unknowns. The selections range from fiction, to memoir, to graphic/comics. In that aspect, the book is very well-rounded. There are eerie stories such as Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” in which two best friends attend summer camp but only one returns. There are humorous tales like Mark Oppenheimer’s remembrances of spending summer at a nudist camp only to spend the following summer at a leftist camp. If you’re looking for a story to pull at your heartstrings, Kevin Canty’s “Flipper” and Josh Lambert’s “The Brief Summer of Amir and Ariella” will do just that. “The Performance of Drowning” and “Apple Pie” had me completely captivated and I could easily have read a full novel based on both stories.

Of course, there were some duds in the collection. But these were very few and far between. I wold definitely recommend this as a summer read that fits perfectly into your beach bag.

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