The Yellow Wallpaper is a psychological short story about a Victorian woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. When her husband deems she needs a "rest cure" after the birth of their child, they rent an abandoned colonial mansion with a "queer air" about it. The narrator's claustrophobic room has unpleasant, oppressive yellow wallpaper which incites her decent into madness.

In the first of two short stories horror stories, "Warface," urban legend has it that eons ago Samuel Ketchum killed and tortured countless Indians on remote Indian Island. Not even women and children were spared. Years later, tales of bizarre disappearance and drowning surfaced. Locals tell of a tribal witch doctor Ketchum burned alive on that very island and speculate he now roams the land seeking vengeance for his death by collecting innocent souls for eternity. He is Chief Warface, and he's out there haunting Indian Island. In the story "Links to My Past," while visiting a graveyard during a class trip to Old Bethpage Village Restoration, a group of students notice the name on a headstone is the same as one of the students'. That student, Richard Valentine, starts having dreams and goes back to the time dated on the tombstone of 1887. This cemetery contains graves of the unwanted; murderers, rapists, and those possessed by witchcraft. What Valentine sees changes him forever.

Lydia Millet's previous work has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Likewise greeted with rapturous praise, Sweet Lamb of Heaven is a first-person account of a young mother, Anna, fleeing her cold and unfaithful husband, a businessman who's just launched his first campaign for political office. When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. But the longer they stay, the less the guests in the dingy motel look like typical tourists-and the less Ned resembles a typical candidate. As his pursuit of Anna and their child moves from threatening to criminal, Ned begins to alter his wife's world in ways she never could have imagined. A double-edged and satisfying story with a strong female protagonist, a thrilling plot, and a creeping sense of the apocalyptic, Sweet Lamb of Heaven builds to a shattering ending with profound implications for its characters-and for all of us.