MG Stephens is a neurodivergent intuitive. She started experiencing paranormal activity as early as two years old.Her mother was also a well-known psychic who worked with detectives and solved cold cases. MG struggled to accept her abilities for decades and tried her best to dismiss all of the terrifying encounters she was having.After many years of hesitancy, MG finally learned that her abilities could help people and began to slowly accept and develop them. After much pro...

The Winter 2015-16 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.The stories, poems, and essays that comprise this staff-edited issue of Ploughshares are diverse and timely. Visit a South African laundromat in Laurie Baker’s short story, Here I Am, Laughing with Boers;...

Time to get tough, Mommies! Witty and fun, Life with Toddlers dishes out no-nonsense guidance and down to earth techniques. Pulling no punches, this mom of three lays out toddler discipline with empathy, and yes, a few migraines of her own! Most toddler books are filled with peachy, useless, it'll-be-fine advice. Well, no more!

November 13th, 2021 will be forever burned into my memory. That day, my sister passed away via medical assistance in dying, after an 18 month battle with metastatic breast cancer. Medical assistance in dying became legal in Canada in 2016. Since then, thousands of terminally ill patients have taken advantage of their right to die. I never dreamed that my own sister would be one of them.Early in the pandemic of 2020, my youngest sister Jennifer received the diagnosis of Stage IV infl...

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeA Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How shou...

With a combined total of over 300,000 Girlfriends' Guides in print, Vicki Iovine offers the kind of tongue-in-cheek humor and straight-from-the-hip advice that has made her one of today's most popular authorities on child rearing. Now she takes the next step in the Girlfriends series by helping mothers deal with that mysterious, baffling, often adorable and frequently alarming being their baby has become--a toddler.

Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord.The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall" is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical "The Sleep," Caitlin...

"Twenty masterfully crafted short stories" by T.C. Boyle, Emma Cline, Mary Gaitskill, and more: "Outstanding and well worth the read." — Booklist (starred review)"To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time," recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. "They were windows into emotions I had and hadn't had, into other settings and circumstances and ob...

“Beautiful. The human condition is on full display in these glimpses of our essential connectedness. Perfect for our times.”—Dani Shapiro, author of InheritanceSixty-five extraordinary writers grapple with this mystery: How can an ephemeral encounter with a stranger leave such an eternal mark?When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to write a letter to a stranger about an unforgettable encounter, she opened the floodgates. Th...

Curated by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild, this volume shares intimate perspectives from some of today's most acclaimed writers.As Cheryl Strayed explains in her introduction, "the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be and nothing was ever the same again." The reader, in other words, should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit. In this edition of the acclaimed anthology series, Strayed has gathered ...

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee.Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

A hilarious collection from McSweeney's that "achieves the sensation of being hit by a hip, humorous train.... Breaks mold after mold in hilarious fashion" (The New York Times).Now more than ever, Americans are troubled by questions. As sweaty modernity thrusts itself upon us, the veil of ignorance that cloaked our nation hangs in tatters, tattered tatters. Our "funny bones" are neither fun nor bony. Glum is the new giddy, and the old giddy wasn't too gidd...