A woman finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of an art museum. A divorcee decamps to a place where nobody knows her name but can’t escape the watchful eye of the world she’s slipped away from. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about whom she trusts when her partner reveals a fundamental truth about himself.

For readers of explosive stories by Lauren Groff, Joy Williams, and Deborah Eisenberg, Emergency presents seven radically intimate, masterfully executed excavations of the unfreedoms of American life and the guilt that stalks those who survive them. Grappling with poverty and addiction, class ascension and sexual power, the women in these stories try to pay down the psychic debts of their old lives as they search for a new happiness they can afford.