The Words of Dr. L: & Other Stories

by Karen E. Bender

Overview

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 stranger

Grounded 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, and caring for an aging parent.

A young woman seeks to learn the magical words that can terminate her unwanted pregnancy. A mother discovers an extra child in her home she had forgotten about. A couple is separated from their son and encased in globes orbiting the Earth. Society develops a terrible plan to leave the burning planet for a life on Mars. Each story honors the emotional force of its situation by grappling with themes of freedom, self-definition, youth, aging, control, and power. Using settings both familiar and fantastic, Bender’s work explores the ordinary in the extraordinary to discover secret, hidden truths in the lifelong connection between parents and their children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640095717
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

KAREN E. BENDER is the author of the story collections The New Order and Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Story, Harvard Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, and other magazines. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, and have won three Pushcart prizes. She has won grants from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught for numerous MFA programs and is currently a visiting writer for the Stony Brook University MFA in creative writing and on the core faculty for the Alma College MFA program.

Editorial Reviews

03/31/2025

Bender’s impressive latest (after The New Order) explores relationships between friends and family with a mix of speculative and realist tales. The narrator of “The Words of Dr. L” lives in a dystopian future where pregnant women are required by law to become mothers. She hopes to end her pregnancy, breaking from her best friend Joanne, who joins a group called Protection, established to shield women’s fetuses from their “untoward thoughts.” In the unsettling and dreamlike “The Extra Child,” a couple drops off their youngest child at college, only to return home and find another child who “looked to be about ten” and claims to be theirs (“Suddenly, I knew it,” the mother thinks. “I had given birth to him, clearly in some sort of haze, and then I had forgotten him”). The most moving story, “Arlene Is Dead,” follows a family who care for their elderly relative Sylvia while weathering the Covid pandemic. In the monotony of quarantine, they become delighted by how animated Sylvia becomes when ranting about a self-absorbed friend. Bender’s more fantastical stories recall the work of Isaac Asimov, while her realist takes offer insight into the complex lives of characters navigating loss and disappointment. It’s an accomplished collection from a seasoned storyteller. Agent: Maria Massie, Massie & McQuilken. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Los Angeles Times, A Must-Read Book of May
Write or Die, A Must-Read Book of the Month
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"These often speculative stories take place in worlds in which troubling features of our own are amplified . . . Beyond the collection’s interest in political commentary, what most animates it is familial heartache." —The New Yorker

"Insights pierce depictions of the intrinsic connections of parents and children, family and friends . . . The Los Angeles native’s masterful sleights of hand reveal the dystopian elements of our current reality and the resonant aspects of far-off futures." —Alta

"Bender perfectly narrows the gap between the speculative and the frighteningly real, drawing on the connection between parents and their children to craft stories that ache with familial love. If you didn’t already know that Karen Bender was one of our greatest short story writers working today, let The Words of Dr. L make it perfectly clear." —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

"A collection of stories that artfully reframe issues including parenting, aging, illness, and life during the Covid-19 pandemic . . . As if turning a shirt inside-out and finding a beautiful new pattern, Bender [...] does a brilliant job of discovering novel metaphors and creating futuristic plots to re-examine some of life’s most taken-for-granted relationships and situations . . . Highly original stories that speak to the challenges of being human in the 21st century." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The concreteness of Bender’s language is in sharp contrast to the deep strangeness and troubling ambiguity afoot in the dystopian worlds her characters must navigate . . . Bender’s finely calibrated prose makes the most bizarre situations feel plausible and the most ordinary predicaments seem uncanny, while her psychological insights into marriage, parenting, guilt, memory, age, and loss are poignantly precise. These are many-faceted, deeply ponderable stories." —Booklist (starred review)

"Meticulously crafted . . . Despite a premonition of disaster in many of Bender's riveting selections, an atmosphere of gentleness envelops her characters . . . In Bender's investigation of isolation and community, parents and children, friends and seeming enemies, these twelve stories allow readers a wide lens through which to both contemplate world events and what may lay ahead—and to consider the vital role of compassion when weighing one's choices . . . [B]eautifully crafted." —Jennifer M. Brown, Shelf Awareness

"Bender’s impressive latest explores relationships between friends and family with a mix of speculative and realist tales . . . Bender’s more fantastical stories recall the work of Isaac Asimov, while her realist takes offer insight into the complex lives of characters navigating loss and disappointment. It’s an accomplished collection from a seasoned storyteller." —Publishers Weekly

“Karen Bender’s stories deftly explore our current American moment, a troubling one that verges on insanity. Bender is concerned with love, family, and motherhood, and in these beautifully written stories she uses words to describe thoughts and feelings that I’ve never seen described before. A great writer helps us understand who we are, and what it means to be human.” —Matthew Klam, author of Who is Rich?

"Karen Bender’s brilliant new collection of stories is devastating in its human truths yet not without hope. In worlds where nouns are capitalized (Confusion, Separation, Protection) and empathy is under siege, these stories provide the answer to Andromeda Romano-Lax’s question: How can fiction predict a future that’s already happening? Motherhood circles around climate change, reproductive rights orbit autocracy, love swirls around pestilence and vicious patriarchy. Yet Bender’s characters never lose sight of the urgency of resilience and change. These stories ensure that we never stop asking the questions that will save us. The Words of Dr. L is a true literary masterwork." —Carolyn Ferrell, author of Dear Miss Metropolitan

From the Publisher

★ 2025-03-08
A collection of stories that artfully reframe issues including parenting, aging, illness, and life during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“He hypnotized me, and I loved him”: That’s the beginning of “The Hypnotist,” a story about the narrator’s lifelong connection with her father. “The hypnosis depended on a sort of innocence, a bargain between parent and child.” As if turning a shirt inside-out and finding a beautiful new pattern, Bender—a National Book Award finalist for her story collectionRefund (2015)—does a brilliant job of discovering novel metaphors and creating futuristic plots to re-examine some of life’s most taken-for-granted relationships and situations. In “The Listener,” one of the collection’s standouts, a therapist named Saul suffers from a mysterious illness (perhaps chronic fatigue syndrome) that saps all his energy. Bender finds the perfect way to show how Saul’s invisible illness feels by having him kidnapped at gunpoint by a man pretending to be a new patient. At the bank, where his captor has taken him to withdraw money, now posing as his son, no one can see what’s happening: “What did it take for someone to see another?” he wonders, a question that cuts right to the heart of how well anyone can truly know other people. Other stories are incisive allegories for our age. In “The Shame Exchange,” which won a Pushcart Prize, elected officials who have no shame take on the shame of ordinary people selected by a lottery, with the idea that they might begin to “govern with sensitivity and in a kindly way,” while in “The Court of the Invisible,” people begin disappearing because of the cruelty of everyday life. Not a lot happens in many of these stories; sometimes that feels like the point, as in “Data” and “Arlene Is Dead,” two tales that capture the disorienting claustrophobia of the pandemic, though other pieces might have been trimmed without losing anything.

Highly original stories that speak to the challenges of being human in the 21st century.

Kirkus Reviews