"Alice Sebold meets Roxane Gay in Michelle Bowdler's literary debut, telling her story of rape and recovery while interrogating why one of society's most serious crimes goes largely uninvestigated The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. It pounces, flattens, destroys. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that life, that body is gone. Award-winning writer and public health executive Michelle Bowdler's memoir indicts...

"A "mind-blowing, page-turning, unputdownable" novel (Elif Batuman) about the fifteen-year fallout from a poisonous high school rumor, exploring how stories from the past can come to define who we are. A gifted and reclusive ghostwriter, Alice Lovett makes a living helping other people tell their stories. But she is haunted by the one story she cannot tell: the story of, as she puts it, "the things that happened while I was asleep." Back in 1999,...

"The paths of two women on opposite ends of a high-profile sexual abuse scandal set them on a devastating collision course. On a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet on line at an ice cream kiosk in the Ile de la Citae. One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness. When two leering male...

"Missoula, Montana, is a typical college town, with a highly regarded state university, bucolic surroundings, a lively social scene, and an excellent football team, the Grizzlies, with a rabid fan base. The Department of Justice investigated 350 sexual assaults reported to the Missoula police between January 2008 and May 2012. Few of these assaults were properly handled by either the university or local authorities. In this, Missoula is also typical....

"An experimental novel that reveals one young woman's every thought over the course of twenty-four hours"--

"It's 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place-until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the...

'It happened on a Sunday night, even though I'd been a good girl and gone to church that morning.' One brisk November evening during her senior year at a small Midwestern Christian college, two armed intruders broke into the house Ruth Everhart shared with her roommates, held all five girls hostage, and took turns raping them at gunpoint. Reeling with fear, insecurity, and guilt, Ruth believed she was ruined, both physically and in the eyes of God....

"In this ... anthology, ... Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are 'routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied' for speaking out"--

"Rape is, unfortunately, an all-too-common violent crime usually perpetrated against women. For victims, the process of sharing information about the assault with loves ones or reporting the crime to police can be harrowing, embarrassing, and painful. The emotional aftermath and the responses of others can greatly affect the way a rape survivor copes. Although there are trained counselors to help women through the process of recovery, the question...