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Product Description
Product Description
A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?
Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending.
Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer.
Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending.
Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
After reading through the stories in this collection over three times, I have to say that Aimee Bender is one of the best new writers I've read in years. Her stories are language-driven, impacted with brilliant images and NEW ways of describing emotions and situations that are universal. Perhaps this is why some commentators have declared that she is only out for the outlandish and bizarre, and hasn't spent a day in the real world. It's because she's not going the old, well-traveled route to show us life in all its darkness and glory. Also, any slightly savvy reader would see that she's working with form and structure, adopting the speed and economy and shocking language of fairy tales and applying it to tell modern stories. Some reviewers have said that her characters aren't connected to the world or even to their own selves, as though this is something Ms. Bender doesn't realize. They seem to see this as a weakness of hers. Perhaps they've failed to realize that Bender's characters being disconnected from society and their own selves is her point. And a poignant one, too. She's awesome. I'll re-read these stories for the rest of my life.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This collection has been hideously overhyped. The stories are trite and cliched, and yet the author seems to be trying so terribly hard. You'd be thrilled to read these in a high school lit. mag., but what a disappointment that a major publisher would take them on.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Two words: "wow" and "imaginative" sum up this wonderful collection of short stories. While reading "Skirt", I kept thinking "Aimee has got one hell of an imagination!!" My favorite story is "The Librarian" (not the real title, but what it is most often called). You will never look at a librarian with quite the same eye as you have in the past.
I have had the honour of meeting Ms. Bender. At her reading she read the "Imp" story with much animation and passion. It is a joy to see not only a fantastic new writer blossom, but to know that she is a NICE person as well.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Not what I expected on the inside.
I work in a bookstore and I have never seen a local author self-promote a book with such a fervor that I was moved to buy it. Read more
Published on 9 July 1999
No revelations here.
What kind of bad trance are these stories? Thank god there are other books out there that can capture the true essence of this wierd world without trying this hard. Read more
Published on 8 July 1999
puzzling
1924. The eye exisist in a natural state. Because I have deluded myself into thinking I am a puppy, I can only see people as ducks. Read more
Published on 22 Jun 1999
I'm Jealous!
This is exactly why I won't ever become a writer-because I will never write like this! I can't wait for Aimee's novel. Please write again soon!
Published on 31 May 1999
So good I had a breakdown
I have read at last eleven books in my life and this is probably the best of any of them. This is way better than either Lord of the Rings or The Man Without Qualities. Read more
Published on 27 May 1999
One of the worst this literature major has ever read!
I read the book for a class in modern american short story. As a graduating senior, I was appalled at the writing,(too simplistic), and the subject matter was assuredly pushing... Read more
Published on 5 May 1999
Freshly New!
Bender really seems to know how to tap into the right emotions . I've read the book twice already. Her stories are fluid. I thought about it for days.
Published on 26 Feb 1999
Highly readable, but too gimmicky
Bender is afflicted by a syndrome affecting too many young authors: a compulsion to go over the top for no reason more apparent than being described as "eccentrically... Read more
Published on 22 Feb 1999
Life Is Beautiful
Thank you Aimee Bender for writing such lively written and real stories..... This writer intentionally asks all limited scholars to stretch their brain and see beyond text... Read more
Published on 16 Feb 1999
Literature for Space Cadets
Trendy, vacuous, self-consciously eccentric drivel with a flaky prose style injected now and then with a four-letter word or lewd act to lend some much-needed grit and sex appeal. Read more
Published on 11 Feb 1999
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