For best friends with vastly different fortunes, what’s left to hash out other than a forced confession at gunpoint? All that the destitute, sickly, and grieving Will demands is that monstrously successful Barry admit to draining all the luck right out of him. Like blood. As the standoff escalates, the truth is not the only thing ready to come out.

Journalist Heidi Cohen is in Cape Cod investigating the sources of recurring toxic algae blooms along the coast. A local named Jimmy has his own theory for her. Every year the fetid growth gets worse—but it’s been going on longer than anyone knows. Decades ago, something happened to Jimmy that he’s never forgotten. Is Heidi ready for the real story?

The dense Michigan forest. Haunting wails. The clip-clop of demon hooves on a bridge to nowhere. It’s more than a tall tale to Brenda Jennings, whose sister disappeared in those woods one fateful night. Three years later, on a solo stakeout in the dark, Brenda goes in after her. She’s desperate for answers, and terrified to find what lies waiting on the other side of that bridge.

The Strauss family is on knife’s edge. Sam is a resentful stay-at-home dad. Rachel feels the restlessness in her blood returning. Their children are getting out of hand. And a recent mudslide has forced the wolves out of the woods to look for food. As dusk falls and tensions rise, the family must come together to survive the night—from the threats outside and those within.

A trip to the library prompts one woman to question her fate in this galvanizing short story. For a woman like Hadley, deemed not acceptable to procreate, there’s only one recourse. Unlicensed for motherhood, she can alleviate her grief and frustration at a “baby library,” where a curiously endless supply of infants is available for a two-week loan. But the borrowed life that serves as a temporary balm leads to a journey of self-discovery that will forever change the direction of Hadley’s future.

Willy and Marianne’s farmhouse in Maine has acres of meadow and fresh air, and a lonesome bridle path in the forest along which Willy daydreams and ambles. When he’s loaned a decrepit old baby stroller to cart his groceries home, the rickety squeak of the wheels comforts him. So do the sweet coos of a baby Willy knows can’t be real. Can it? In this twisted thicket, wishes come true—with a price.

Germany, 1945. In the waning days of World War II, the Nazis have been all but defeated. Uwe Fuchs, never a fighter, feels fortunate to have avoided the front lines as he cared for his widowed mother. But Uwe’s fortune changes when Hans Sauer, the village bully, recruits him to join a guerilla resistance unit preparing for the arrival of Allied soldiers. At first, Uwe is wary. The war is lost, and rumor has it that Hans is a deserter. But Hans entices him with talk of power, brutality, and their village’s ancestral lore: werewolves.

Hillary Jean leads an enviable life. She has a loving husband, a beautiful home, caring friends, and meaningful work planning fundraisers. Yet she’s always felt incomplete. After a DNA website emails her a match, Hillary sets out to find the daughter she gave up twenty-five years ago. But her hunger to reconnect threatens to destroy the very thing she hopes to gain.

Love, be it wild or tender, often defies logic. In fact, at times, the only rationale behind the instant connection of two souls is plain magic. Bibiña Aranda, runaway bride, wakes up in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao still wearing her wedding dress, draped in the loving arms of a naked man whose name she doesn’t know. She and the man with no clothes, Indar Zubieta, attempt to explain to the authorities how they got there. It’s a story of love at first sight and experience beyond compare, one that involves a dreamlike journey through the museum.

Dove, a recovering alcoholic covered in Emily Dickinson tattoos, serves up drinks and small talk at a casino in Vegas. Russell is a man on a roll. He claims to be a chain-restaurant manager, yet his tells point to different skills. The two leave together at the end of the night, but when all pretense is stripped away, they find themselves in a fight for their lives.

Tiana Carter has just started college and is determined to make the most of it. She’s thrilled to be posting videos about dorm-room cooking and campus fashion for a small but loyal band of followers. When she dips into the online dating pool, her first swipe right raises a huge red flag. Tiana’s polite rejection is met with scorn, and now a group of self-proclaimed “high-value men” are hell-bent on ruining her life.

Leah has spent her formative years isolated on a remote island with her family. But their quiet existence, far from the devastated mainland, is cracking. Father, sensing a coming threat, demands that a wall be built. As the stone blockade rises, Father’s paranoia escalates. So does Leah’s dread that the violence the family left behind has found its way to their sanctuary. 

Shelby is struggling with parenthood, marriage, a passive-aggressive mother, and unemployment. But she also has a sweet escape in her beloved Hallmark movies. When a secret admirer promises to sweep her away into a world of those same romantic tropes, the temptation is so heady, Shelby can already smell the pumpkin spice. But this rom-com dream has a whiff of conspiracy....

In this eye-opening short story, a tech reporter’s mistake unites two women eight thousand miles apart. One in New Jersey, one in the Philippines. Same name: Sandra Guzman. Same job: content moderators for a mega social media website. What transpires between them is a friendship that changes their perceptions of each other’s privilege and challenges the power of the very industry they work for.

A genealogy test sparks a woman’s reflection on the two accounts of her life--the real one and the one she’s always told the world--in this poignant short story by Cheryl Strayed, the bestselling author of Wild. In 1964, teenage Geraldine Waters was sent away by her parents to an unwed mothers’ home, where she gave up her newborn for adoption. Ever since, she’s lived an alternative narrative. Decades later, it’s time for Geraldine to reconcile the telling of her life, to finally grieve, and to discover what happened to that part of her past that slipped away.