In this collection, best-sellers, award winners, and emerging voices lead us through the murky, overblown, hungry mind-set of youth. From parental dysfunction to new sexual experiences to dealing with illness and death, the coming-of-age story has never been so newly and complicatedly rendered.

Our childhood fears are on full display in this collection. Imaginary characters come to life, something evil lurks in the night, bullies taunt us, parents stand in our way, and ghosts from the past haunt our adult lives. Accurate, raw, and moving, these stories show children teetering on the cusp of messy adulthood, and we see our own early days and desires. In the opening story, a young man's vision of Roy Rogers - his abusive, ailing father's childhood hero - leads him through his family's tough past. Clark Blaise's eerily rendered Cold War America comes next, where a teenage boy faces an enemy much closer to home. Miranda Beverly-Whittemore takes us further into the darkness with an entrancing, uncomfortable story that shows a teenage girl commiting a desperate act. And in Dana Kletter's "Night Song", a mother and daughter become entwined with the same drug-addled trumpet player. The collection ends with Katherine Vaz's surreal "Swan Sister", in which a girl imagines away her baby sister's illness and death until the memory begins to haunt her when she herself becomes a mother.