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3.5. Imaginative. Heavy on personification. Preferred the stories in the first section over the latter two - more state of mind stories.
Short stories aren't really my thing. I also kind of felt these were lacking in substance a bit, and felt weird for the sake of it.
It was suggested she was a female Etgar Keret, but Keret is far more artful and thoughtful in his shorts. Whereas I have the sense he's a melancholy and thoughtful man who hides his sensitivity with a cuddly veneer, I feel Bender is a Keret-wannabe who hides her lack of insight and wisdom with her cute, "imaginative" story lines.
as always... top notch Merged review: "Books are the mirrors of the soul." Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts take Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa, especially the writing style and slight drips of metaphysicalness, spirituality, and imagery, slather it with Haruki Murakami; but don't over do it. Add a dash of Karen Russell (when she is on her game).... and you have this book.these stories, while completely, definitely grounded in their ownness, are somehow linked. The linking is personal...
All's I am saying is, if you do not love Aimee Bender yet, get this book, read Skinless, Fell This Girl, The Healer, and The Ring. If you still don't love her after that, I'm not really sure we can be friends anymore.
There's no doubt that Aimee Bender has a vivid imagination and a penchant for the strange. Unfortunately, for me that is simply not enough to make for a memorable, satisfying read. I came away from this collection with an overwhelming feeling of disappointment.Sure, the writing is fine and it even sparkles on occasion. There are enough strange things happening to catch anyone's interest, at least momentarily. The problem is a lack of depth. Every single story felt superficial to me, as if it was...
Have I mentioned that I love Aimee Bender yet? I wonder: If I start experimenting with drugs would I be able to come up with this sort of writing? That would be great. Pity I can't afford drugs. Silly drugs, I mean, of course. Like mushrooms or whatever it is that makes things look a little brighter and sparklier. I'm giving this book a 5 because I think that being the type of person who writes these sort of weird and confusing-for-most-people stories is kind of important. Year ago when I read T...
4.5 stars. Each story in this collection gets at least a 4 from me. The bizarro realism Bender employs is refreshing and inspiring. Tales range from whimsical and silly to gut-wrenching and heavy, often within the same story. Can’t wait to get my hands on Aimee Bender’s other collections!
Aimee Bender's debut collection of stories is comprised of the sort of fiction which excels in theory, but not in practice. As advertised on the back cover, these stories are supposed to be twisted, unconventional and grotesque - but are they?The first story in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, The Rememberer, is the most successful: it's about a woman whose partner is experiencing reverse evolution. From a man he slowly morphs first into an ape, and then into another lower form of life, a sea tu...
i've read aimee bender stories before but never a whole book at once. i think to be honest i like them better spaced out. but that's my fault, i suppose, and not hers. not like she's got a gun to my head.anyway, bender writes short, perfectly structured surreal first-person stories. well, mostly first person. sometimes third. there's a story about a man who wakes up with a hole going directly through his stomach, and then his wife becomes pregnant and gives birth to her own mother. but it's firs...
The first time I read this, I gave it four stars. Recently I had to reread it for a fiction class, and after poring over it a second time, I have no choice but to lower the score to a three. Initially, I think I was enchanted with Bender's work due to her unique plots and characters. Following my second run through, I can't say that there were many characters I liked, and the characters I did like usually weren't the protagonists.
Strange stories, not interested in any.
This book is a perfect example of how judging a book by its cover can be problematic. Had I never gathered non-cover-related compelling reasons that I might like this book I may've never picked it up, based on that quick, cliche judgment of the book binding's face. The cover looks, hmm, what's the word, twee. Cutesy. Quirky. Etc. Not exactly the kind of thing I like to read. But its contents, while being whimsical to some degree, are much more richly textured with moods than mere variations of q...
How funny that I should have just read the essay "A Reader's Manifesto", by B. R. Myers, when I picked up this book. In the essay (available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107... for now) Myers skewers various superstars of "literary fiction"--Cormac McCarthy, Rick Moody, David Guterson, and others--for turning out poorly-written books that are all flash and no substance. The brilliantly bizarre set pieces here, unfortunately, suffer from the same problem. Bender is all about the good sent...
How many times has this happened to you?You're reading a novel about a single mother struggling to raise two kids in a backwoods town in Kentucky and you flip to the author info on the dust jacket...only to discover that the writer is a single mother raising two kids in a small town in Kentucky, and you say to yourself (or the person trying to sleep next to you), "HOW IS THIS EVEN FICTION?"Well, that won't happen when you're reading THIS book. Unless Ms. Bender is the weirdest person who ever li...
This one is considerably bleaker than The Color Master, but still has that dreamy, dark fairy tale vibe that drew me in so effectively in that collection.The reason why it didn't work so well for me is the fact that the symbolism is much more heavy-handed and clumsy, and the slight absurdity of magical realism feels less natural and smoothly blended in than it does in Aimee Bender's later work.In short, it's an extremely engaging and quite unsettling little treat, written with Bender's usual sup...
Introduced to Aimee Bender by "This American Life". Master of intriguing short stories that connect the reader to the characters. I feel the need to read all of Aimee's stuff just to make sure I am not missing some sort of amazing feeling I have not felt before. The nameless "finding guy" made me cry: "He lay in bed that night with the trees from other places rustling, and he could feel their confusion. No snow here. Not a lot of rain. Where am I? What is wrong with this dirt? Crossing his hands...
This is the first book in a while which I've actually felt some hatred towards. I began to cringe every time I picked it up, but I hate to not finish a book (especially one this small; surely I can power through it I kept telling myself). So thank god that's done. Several of the stories had pretty much the exact same type of female protagonist - vain, superficial, vapid, and horny. It started to bother me that I was essentially reading about the same stupid bitch in completely different plot lin...
I first read this collection in high school, loved it despite not really 'getting' any of it, and over the past few years would crack it open every now and then to read the first two stories—"The Remember," and "Call My Name." "The Rememberer," because I'm continually moved by that story's narrator; her grace and her grief. And "Call My Name," because I'm always amazed at the way Bender can get a reader [specifically, me] to sympathize with characters who lack any redeeming qualities whatsoever....
An heiress secretly auditioning men; a wife whose husband returns from the war zone with no lips; a woman who gives birth to her mother; a mermaid going to high school; two mutant girls – one with an ice hand dripping healing water, and the other with a fire hand lighting cigarettes after school hours; an orphan with a knack for finding lost things; an old couple who dreamt the same dreams. And life in between.This short story collection was sold to me as a gallery of interesting women and some