Literary Hub

NBA-Finalist Karen E. Bender’s Favorite Short Stories

All-Time Greats and Unexpected Gems from a Master of the Form

November 18, 2015

When I read these stories, I really wish I had written them. I am having conversations with these stories, in different ways.

I read for strangeness—the sense that the world is presented in a way that is not how you have been told it is, but that you know, instinctively, it can be. I read for the beauty of the language and sentences, and a sense of vision and real feeling. All of these stories have these elements. Go read them, now.

: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” by Nathan Englander

Karen E. Bender

Karen E. Bender is the author of most recently, The New Order: Stories and Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and long-listed for the Story Prize. She’s also the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. She has won grants from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the NEA. She lives in Virginia with her husband, author Robert Anthony Siegel, and their two children.