New Fiction: A Reading

Karen E. Bender is the author of the novels A Town of Empty Rooms and Like Normal People. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Story, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Guenica, and other magazines. Her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and have won two Pushcart prizes. In Refund (Counterpoint Press) —Finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction— Bender creates a collection of stories that deeply explore the ways in which money and the estimation of value affect the lives of her characters. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Jim Shepard is the author of six previous novels and four collections of stories, including, You think That’s Bad; Like You’d Understand,. Anyway; Love and Hydrogen; and Project X: A Novel. His work has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Zoetrope, Playboy, and Vice, among other periodicals. In Shepard’s newest book The Book of Aron: A Novel (Knopf), Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo. Shepard has masterfully made this child’s-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring.

Jonathan Galassi is a lifelong veteran of the publishing world and the author of three collections of poetry, as well as translations of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. Galassi is the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the eight major publishers in New York. A former Guggenheim Fellow and poetry editor of The Paris Review, he also writes for The New York Review of Books and other publications. His debut novel is Muse (Knopf), a story at once hilarious and tender, about the decades-long rivalry between two publishing lions, and the iconic, alluring writer who has obsessed them both.