Huge

(Crown Publishers) Eugene “Huge” Smalls, an incredibly smart kid with a penchant for cursing and a taste for detective stories, spends the summer before his 13th birthday sleuthing in his suburban New Jersey hometown. Hired by his grandmother to discover the vandals who defaced a sign in front of her retirement home, Huge goes looking for clues — and ends up exploring a junior-high world of posers, jocks, and wastrels. Lonely and angry, he tells his own story, one filled with voyeurism, bad language, adolescent sex, bullies, football tryouts, pot smoking, fistfights, high school parties, and a stuffed frog named Thrash. Fuerst spent his teenage years in New Jersey and currently lives in Brooklyn. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from The New School.