Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin from the noir genre, has brought her eager and discerning eye to the curation of a superb anthology of brand-new top-shelf brief stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men aren’t generally the victims in these tales, they obtain due often enough to fulfill listeners who are fed up with the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a small amount of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal culture. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm within your chair, stay up during the night, laugh out loud, and inevitably want more.

Featuring brand-new stories by: Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood (poems), Valerie Martin, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, Sheila Kohler, S. A. Solomon, S. J. Rozan, Lucy Taylor, Cassandra Khaw, Bernice L. McFadden, Jennifer Morales, Elizabeth McCracken, Livia Llewellyn, Lisa Lim, and Steph Cha.