Forever Sisters: Famous Writers Celebrate the Power of Sisterhood with Short Stories, Essays, and Memoirs

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Chapter 1: Seven Sisters
A woman I worked with, named Ellery, was having a baby. Addison, her sister, was giving the shower, and since I volunteered to help, I was asked to arrive an hour earlier than all the other guests.

Chapter 1: Seven Sisters, Part 2
It is a very bad idea to be the older sister. You are a shrew, you are lazy, selfish, sometimes beautiful with a beauty corrupted by your uncompassionate nature. Your love of jewels and general luxury is so strong it overrides all judgment.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker tells a mother's tale of reunion between her daughters: one trapped in Southern poverty, the other making it big in the city. Marilyn French movingly depicts two young women growing apart in a dysfunctional alcoholic family. With sharp humor, Joy Fielding plays out the consequences for half-sisters reunited on a TV talk show. Fae Myenne Ng writes of growing up in a culture that considers a family with only girl children "failed." Recalling her grandmother and great-aunt, Olivia Goldsmith unfolds a dark memoir of sisterhood gone terrifyingly awry. Cristina Garcia relates a poignant reunion of sisters separated for thirty years, one trapped in Cuba, the other escaped to Miami. And in a splendid retelling of a classic fairy tale, Rita Dove imagines Beauty's forgotten sisters, while her wild romance with the Beast takes flight.

Claudia O'Keefe is the editor of the anthology Mother, praised as "a literary feast" (USA Today). Her newest anthology, Father, is forthcoming in trade paperback from Pocket Books. She is the author of the novels Gawkers and Black Snow Days; her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and magazines. Ms. O'Keefe is the granddaughter of Walter O'Keefe, a Broadway composer and radio legend of the 1940s.

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