Aimee Bender lives in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Story, The Antioch Review, and several other publications. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, and she is currently at work on her first novel.
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
by Aimee Bender
Paperback
- ISBN-13: 9780385492164
- Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date: 08/28/1999
- Pages: 192
- Sales rank: 135,671
- Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)
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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 shapedand sometimes twistedby 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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Publishers Weekly
"Superbly imagined. Bender has hit the ground running."
Entertainment Weekly
"Bender's stories read like modern fableswith a healthy sense of twisted humor thrown in for good measure."
The Village Voice Literary Supplement
"Aimee Bender's stories come as a revelation....She's a thrilling discovery."
Jonathan Lethem, author of Girl in Landscape and As She Climbed Across the Table
"Keep your eye on this writer and her highwire act. I have a feeling she'll be keeping readers breathless for a long time to come."
Dani Shapiro, author of Slow Motion
Entertainment Weekly
Bender's ear is at times undeniably musical. But she also has a weakness for spelling out too much of the obvious. "The Rememberer" might have been simply a delicate story about the elusiveness of love, and the weight of missing someone, if Bender hadn't taken such great pains to spell out what the man, before he devolved, was thinking: "Annie, don't you see? We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart." Instead of a character, Bender has given us a spokesman, and other stories suffer from similar heavy-handedness. In "Marzipan," a man develops a basketball-size hole in his stomach after his father dies, and his wife, at 43, gives birth to a baby who isn't a baby at all but her own mother, who'd died not long before. Symbolism, anyone?
And sometimes you can practically hear Bender straining to set up dramatic catalysts for her characters' epiphanies. In "Skinless," a counselor at a home for runaway teens, who is Jewish, encounters a troubled but treacherous young man at the facility, an obvious anti-Semite who has carved a swastika into his bedstead. The swastika bothers her, naturally. Yet later, she allows herself to be blindfolded (and led around) by the boy in a game of "trust" -- never mind that the home happens to be situated near some giant, steep cliffs. Reading fiction always requires some suspension of disbelief, but you can't help wondering what kind of counselor would allow herself to be blindfolded by a such a clearly messed-up lad. Bender seems merely to have manufactured an artificially dangerous situation for her heroine just to make her point, and it's so jarringly blatant that it throws you out of the story. It's just one example of why The Girl in the Flammable Skirt never quite ignites. -- Salon