by Stephen King
First published 2007
This collection assembles twenty stories that explore moments when people must choose between following rules and honoring their deeper truths. A thirteen-year-old girl takes the witness stand to testify against her father in T.C. Boyle's "Balto," delivering words that could destroy her family. In "Allegiance," Aryn Kyle presents a young girl torn between her despairing British mother and her nurturing American father. A son faces an impossible choice between family duty and moral conviction in Eileen Pollack's "The Bris." Kate Walbert's "Do Something" follows a mother who refuses to accept her son's death. Richard Russo's "Horseman" shows an English professor discovering that a student's plagiarism reveals more truth than honest work ever could. Stephen King curated these voices, finding writers who capture the precise moments when ordinary people must break certain boundaries to remain authentic to themselves.
Genres: fiction, anthologies, american-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: moral-choice, ordinary-people-in-extraordinary-circumstances
Period: 20th-Century, 21st-Century
428 pages · Hardcover · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt