“The fact was it felt good to be angry, to yell and curse, because if she wasn’t angry then she was mostly afraid: of nightmares, of being alone, of the shadows in the church parking lot across the street, of cars backfiring, of the sound of knocking coming now at the door.”

Why is it great? This week we’re spotlighting stellar literary journalism about America’s gun violence epidemic, and this stunning story by Eli Saslow takes an intimate, often uncomfortably close look at the life of a shooting victim after all the headlines have faded and the country’s attention has moved on to the latest massacre. You could say that Saslow embeds himself in the life of 16-year-old Cheyeanne Fitzgerald. This sentence seems to encapsulate the entire piece: the realization that she has no control over her life, the anger over a life disrupted, the fear that threatens to subsume the life left in the ruins. (Read the Storyboard interview with Saslow about the story here.)