Before: Short Stories About Pregnancy From Our Top Writers

As contemporary parenting relationships now encompass such a broad array of forms and guises, the experience of pregnancy includes more emotional, professional, and interpersonal challenges than ever before. Mothers and fathers now face the usual anxieties about difficult pregnancies, financial planning, and the inevitable Lamaze classes, alongside new worries about balancing the professional and artistic goals of two independent parents with the responsibilities of parenthood, struggles with fertility and modern fertility treatments, and explaining a pregnancy of an untraditional couple--or a single woman--to family and friends.

In this groundbreaking anthology of short fiction from America's most popular and critically-acclaimed young writer's, editors Emily Franklin and Heather Swain give voice to the fear, frustration, hope and humor that all play a part in the simultaneously unique and timeless experience of pregnancy in twenty-first-century America.