Alice Sebold

Helen Knightly, a middle-aged depressed divorcee, kills her elderly mother and reveals her miserable childhood, her life of obligation and pain, and her attempts to break free.

An acclaimed journalist shares the painful story of being raped while a freshman in college, and her subsequent fifteen-year struggle with drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder to recover from the terrible ordeal.

Having set aside her own life in her support of her parents, husband, and children, Helen Knightly confronts the realities of the choices that were imposed upon her during a harrowing twenty-four-hour period of death and revelation.

Edited by critically acclaimed, best-selling author Alice Sebold, the stories in this year's collection serve as a provacative literary "antenna for what is going on in the world" (Chicago Tribune). The collection boasts great variety from "famous to first-timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), ensuring yet another rewarding, eduring edition of the oldest and best-selling Best American....

Short stories capture the lives of such offbeat characters as a delusional schizophrenic, an egg donor with second thoughts, and a young girl who discovers a portal to another, ghostly world.