Published in 2025
304 pages
Karen E. Bender is the author of the story collections The New Order and Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Story, Harvard Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, and other magazines. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and have won three Pushcart prizes. She has won grants from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught for numerous MFA programs and is currently a visiting writer for the Stony Brook University MFA in creative writing and on the core faculty for the Alma College MFA program.
What is this book about?
National Book Award finalist Karen E. Bender returns with stunning speculative stories of parents and children, together and apart, surviving near-future dystopias that feel all-too-possible—and realities that can be even stranger
Grounded in both the contemporary United States and a variety of dystopias, celebrated author Karen E. Bender’s otherworldly collection examines the evolving dynamics of the nuclear family during adolescence, motherhood, the empty nest, and caring for an aging parent.
A young woman seeks to learn the magical words that can terminate her unwanted pregnancy. A mother discovers an extra child in her home she had forgotten about. A couple is separated from their son and encased in globes orbiting the Earth. Society develops a terrible plan to leave the burning planet for a life on Mars. Each story honors the emotional force of its situation by grappling with themes of freedom, self-definition, youth, aging, control, and power. Using settings both familiar and fantastic, Bender’s work explores the ordinary in the extraordinary to discover secret, hidden truths in the lifelong connection between parents and their children.
