A GLIMPSE INTO OTHER WORLDS: NEW & DARING SPECULATIVE FICTION

In The Words of Dr. L: & Other Stories, Karen E. Bender explores the nuclear family through adolescence, motherhood, the empty nest, and aging parents. A woman seeks magical words to end a pregnancy, a mother finds a forgotten child, a couple orbits Earth apart from their son, and society flees to Mars. These stories reveal hidden truths of freedom, power, and parent-child bonds. In Allison King’s The Phoenix Pencil Company: A Novel, a hidden magic – the ability to reforge pencils and revive the memories they contain – binds college recluse Monica to her fading grandmother, Yun, and a long-kept family secret. Blending Yun’s wartime past in Shanghai with Monica’s present-day search for connection, King presents a moving saga of memory, family, and the power of stories. In Stuart Nadler’s Rooms for Vanishing: A Novel, war has blown apart the universe of the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Across decades and across the world, alone in their separate futures, each remains haunted by the loss of their loved ones, and each is certain that they are the sole survivor of their family. Ruben Reyes Jr.‘s Archive of Unknown Universes: A Novel is an epic, genre-bending journey that follows two families in alternative timelines of the Salvadoran civil war. It’s a stunning story of displacement and belonging, of loss and love, a daring imagining of what might have been, and a powerful reckoning of our past.

JEWISH LIFE & CULTURE PROGRAMS ARE PRESENTED BY

Buy The Words of Dr. L: & Other Stories – Bender

Buy The Phoenix Pencil Company: A Novel – King

Buy Rooms for Vanishing: A Novel – Nadler

Buy Archive of Unknown Universes: A Novel – Reyes