A high school boy makes a habit of stealing cars, picking up girls, and skipping school. When he begins to worry that he is getting into too much trouble, the boy must decide whether to seek help or continue his criminal lifestyle.

As a boy grows to adulthood in the years encompassing WWII, and his understanding of the world changes, so too does his perception of his schoolteacher father evolve from respectable teacher to embarrassing clown to free-spirited man.

After a young Jewish boy moves to Berlin with his family, he learns that his family agreed to watch a boy from the mental institution on the weekends. The two become friends, and the boy learns more about himself through meeting the other boy.

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

A lonely young boy navigates his sexually-frustrated mother and closeted gay father's unhappy marriage.

A teenager spends the summer dealing with the unsettling company of two older boys. As he spends time dating girls, he becomes increasingly uncertain about what he truly wants in life.

Two boys become friends after one of them displays unflinching honesty in the face of a tyrannical teacher. Ultimately, their friendship is destroyed when the same honesty robs the second boy of some of his childhood ignorance.

Though most of a prep school's students are away for the long weekend, a few boys stay behind at the dorms and are invited to dinner with a wealthy boy and his stepmother. At the dinner, the stepmother's attitude and appearance are just as alluring as the food, but the wealthy student acts strange and detached the whole evening.

A series of vignettes about various sons along a family tree.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.