Crazy

A smart, funny, poignant, very modern autobiographical coming-of-age novel, written when the author was sixteen years old. Like Catcher in the Rye, Crazy appeals to the teenager in us all.Benni himself is partially paralyzed and a serial failure (he's been kicked out of four boarding schools in his short life and has just entered his fifth). So he's a little odd, but he's cool and he finds other strange boys to hang with. Together they set out to experience what they girls, booze, sex, philosophy, drugs, sex, books, music, sex–pretty much everything whatever. And Benni lets us in on "the crazy life" he figures is the only way to deal with the crazy world.

Benjamin Lebert was born in Freiberg in 1982 and has lived in Munich since he was eight. He writes articles for the young-adult supplement of Suddeutsche Zeitung, the leading Munich newspaper. This is his first novel, written when he was just 16, and is largely based on his own life as he struggled to make an adventure out of his adolescence.