Karen E. Bender
Список книг автора Karen E. BenderThe New Order
National Book Award finalist Karen Bender returns with a short story collection that gives resonant voice to the deep anxieties and everyday traumas so many of us grapple with in 2018 The same publicity and marketing team that worked so hard in support of Joan Silber's Improvement and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's A Kind of Freedom will be rallying in support of this new collection Bender is a writer whose sales track does not always reflect how beloved she is, or how her stories punch above their weight and influence a generation of writers and students Praise from Librarians and Booksellers "I do not come by tears easily, but Karen E. Bender knows how to make me cry. This is due not only to the straightforward beauty of her writing, but to her way of so deftly turning her characters inside out. In just a few sentences, she lays them bare and reveals the unmistakable, universal loneliness of the human condition. Whether their fears are existential or literal, her people are so small inside, so vulnerable—it broke my heart as only the best books can. The New Order is a tenderizing, transformative read!" —Lauren Peugh, Powell's Books (Portland, OR)
Refund
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST We think about it every day, sometimes every hour: Money. Who has it. Who doesn’t. How you get it. How you don’t.In Refund , Bender creates an award-winning collection of stories that deeply explore the ways in which money and the estimation of value affect the lives of her characters. The stories in Refund reflect our contemporary world—swindlers, reality show creators, desperate artists, siblings, parents — who try to answer the question: What is the real definition of worth?In “Theft,” an eighty-year-old swindler, accustomed to tricking people for their money, boards a cruise ship to see if she can find something of true value—a human connection. In “Anything for Money,” the creator of a reality show is thrown into the real world when his estranged granddaughter reenters his life in need of a new heart; and in the title story, young artist parents in downtown Manhattan escape the attack on 9/11 only to face a battle over their subletted apartment with a stranger who might have lost more than only her deposit.Set in contemporary America, these stories herald a work of singular literary merit by an important writer at the height of her power.
A Town of Empty Rooms
Karen E. Bender burst on to the literary scene a decade ago with her luminous first novel, Like Normal People, which garnered remarkable acclaim.A Town of Empty Rooms presents the story of Serena and Dan Shine, estranged from one another as they separately grieve over the recent loss of Serena’s father and Dan’s older brother. Serena’s actions cause the couple and their two small children to be banished from New York City, and they settle in the only town that will offer Dan employment: Waring, North Carolina. There, in the Bible belt of America, Serena becomes enmeshed with the small Jewish congregation in town led by an esoteric rabbi, whose increasingly erratic behavior threatens the future of his flock. Dan and their young son are drawn into the Boy Scouts by their mysterious and vigilant neighbor, who may not have their best intentions at heart. Tensions accrue when matters of faith, identity, community, and family all fall into the crosshairs of contemporary, small-town America. A Town of Empty Rooms presents a fascinating insight into the lengths we will go to discover just where we belong.