Like Normal People
By:
Sign Up Now!
Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title.
Learn about membership options,
or view our freely available titles.
- Synopsis
- From the book Jacket: A tour de force of emotional resonance, Like Normal People is a debut that has earned exceptional early attention. Portions of the novel have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, and Story magazine. An excerpt chosen for The Best American Short Stories by Annie Proulx was recorded by Joanne Woodward and aired on NPR's Selected Shorts. 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 the process, Ella relives her own life's dreams and disappointments: her marriage to a sweet, loving shoe salesman; her discovery of Lena's handicap and her aching attempts to give her daughter a "normal" childhood. For so long, Lena has been the focus of Ella's world. When Lena at last finds approximate normalcy - by marrying a man much like herself - Ella must contend with letting her daughter go. Covering three entire lifetimes in the course of one day, Like Normal People is tender, hilarious, and heartbreaking. Bender brilliantly enters into the consciousness of three women at very different stages of life, each on a private search for love and acceptance. Like Normal People is a novel about desire, about what constitutes normality, and, most poignantly, about the ways in which a family finds its strength in the face of adversity. Portions of Karen E. Bender's Like Normal People appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1997 and in The New Yorker. Bender's fiction has also appeared in Granta, Story, the Iowa Review, and the Kenyon Review and has been -reprinted in Pushcart Prize XVIII and other anthologies. The recipient of the prestigious Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, Bender lives in New York City with her husband, the writer Robert Anthony Siegel, and their son.
- Copyright:
- 2000
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Excellent
- Book Size:
- 274 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780395945155
- Publisher:
- N/A
- Date of Addition:
- 02/01/08
- Copyrighted By:
- Karen E. Bender
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Disability-Related, Health, Mind and Body, Literature and Fiction
- Submitted By:
- Shelley L. Rhodes
- Proofread By:
- jill o'connell
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.