A tour de force of literary craft and emotional resonance, Like Normal People charts a family constellation that revolves around an off-kilter center: Lena, who is forty-eight but mentally locked in childhood. Moving deftly between present and past, the novel follows Lena's day-long escape from her residential home with her troubled twelve-year-old niece. While this odd couple takes refuge on a honky-tonk southern California beach, Lena's widowed mother, Ella, goes in search of them. In th...

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 strangerGrounded 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, an...