First Sightings gathers twenty short stories about growing up in contemporary America, selected and edited by John Loughery for Persea Books.

The stories are ordered by the age of their central characters — from early childhood through eighteen — and were chosen for their literary quality and for the range of gender, ethnicity, and circumstance they represent.

Contributors include John Updike, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gish Jen, Barbara Kingsolver, Joyce Carol Oates, Ernest J. Gaines, Michael Chabon, and Philip Roth, among others.