The 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)