Author John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead, says, “Quiet power is something we have too little of in our fiction these days, so I cherished it all the more in Karen Bender’s Town of Empty Rooms. She observes her characters from what you might call a respectful distance, but in a way that penetrates to the psychic muck. She knows that gossip is one of the ways we reveal ourselves. This doesn’t sound like any other book about a Southern small town.”