Karen E. Bender is the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Narrative, The Harvard Review, and The Kenyon Review; they have been included in anthologies such as the Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, and the Pushcart Prize series. Her story collection, Refund, is forthcoming in 2015.
It’s gratifying that Bruce Snider dwells in the past without so much as a hint of nostalgia, that he offers up both the beauty and devastation of small-town Indiana.