Joy spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. When a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. Admitted to a hospital in rural Kansas, she sees a chance to escape her bleak existence by submitting to peculiar treatments...

Presents literature from mainstream and alternative American periodicals, including fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, television writing, and alternative comics by Woddy Allen, Karen Joy Fowler, Andrew Sean Greer, and George Saunders.

Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.

In 2018, novelist Jami Attenberg, faced with a looming deadline, needed motivation. Using a boot camp model, she and a friend set out to write one thousand words every day for two weeks. They opened this practice to Attenberg's online community, and soon hundreds--then thousands--of people started using #1000WordsofSummer to track their work and support one another. What began as a simple challenge between two friends has become a literary movement--write...