""The Woman in the Window"...opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged...

[This story] takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America's affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him.--

Presents a collection of stories that explores the musings of a writer, a prisoner, a student, and others who consider how their lives might have unfolded differently had they made different choices.

The story of Nathanael Vickery who from a rough beginning believes himself to be one of God's chosen, a belief he manifests in wide ambition and religious hysteria, only to come to a humble conclusion informed by his intimate relationship with God.

"Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling...

M.R. Neukirchen--the first female president of a lauded Ivy League institution--struggles to hold onto her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons.