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Thanks to Goodreads and Vintage/Anchor Books for the review copy. This was so unbelievably better than I expected. Each story stands alone as a unique gem and there are absolutely no missteps. Imagine being blindfolded, put on a plane and told you were going somewhere you’ll never guess. That’s the world these stories live in. Almost every sentence is a blind step into the unknown. I was amazed at the unpredictability of each moment and the sheer guts and freedom Bender uses to create her worlds...
I've loved Aimee Bender's short stories for years, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories and Willful Creatures. I keep meaning to read her novels, and will get to them someday, but her stories are often just so beautiful and sad and magical... this volume is no different, and I enjoyed it very much.A few of my favorites:The Red Ribbon - about a couple, with a very sad ending. Wow.I also loved the line "Her body was made up of the wrong chickens."Wordkseepers - I guess you just shoul...
To preface this review, I did not finish this book. I read to about page 110 before giving up. I picked this book up for a couple of dollars somewhere, and to be honest, I'm glad that I didn't spend much more than that. I can see why people enjoy Aimee Bender and to a certain degree, I also enjoyed her writing. She uses some interesting metaphors. For example, "Her hair is so long and wheatlike you could bake it into bread." However, I tired of this flowery style quickly. Perhaps the book just w...
My fellow go to reviewers were so split on Ms. Bender's book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake that I was having trouble deciding whether to take the plunge and give it a try. Imagine my delight when I won a copy of The Color Master her collection of short stories. I thought that this would entice me to go further. As much as I wanted to "get" her writing and embrace it.....it just wasn't there for me. I loved her lyrical prose, and the build up she delivers., the promise of a wonderful stor
Hooray hooray for a new Bender! I may have failed at getting a proof of MaddAddam, but I got this beauty in my hot little hands, which is good consolation.And it's good, it is; but that's trickerous, because truly, there are only a few standouts ("The Color Master," "Devourings"), but they are so spectacular that they cancel out the rest. So when I think about this book I will remember a cake that keeps regenerating itself, shaved opals the exact color of the moon, a woman who marries an ogre, a...
The past few days, which are months in reader-not-reading time, I'd had real trouble getting into books that I'd normally like. Some were too dramatic, others too romantic. Prose too simple, too florid. And then I happened across this anthology, the cover of which had me seduced me in, the title that exorcised my doubts and the stories, writing that captivate me beyond those pages, and will continue to haunt me.Bender writes in the simplest, non-fussy words that somehow, in their arrangement, tu...
(3.5) Bender is best known for The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. This is the second collection of her stories that I’ve read. Most have a touch of the bizarre to them – a tiny tweak to normal life – but some are set in completely alternate worlds. One character experiences extreme face blindness; another deludes himself that he was a famously vicious Nazi during the Second World War. Seamstresses take on odd tasks like repairing endangered animals or, in the title story, creating a dress tha...
Bender is a very interesting writer with a wonderful imagination. Surprisingly, because I tend to associate her with magical realism, not all these stories had magical realism ion them. Of course many of them did. My favorites were the title story, The Colormaster and The wordkeepers, but the story I liked best was the one with the tigers, and I have no idea why. There was really only one story in this collection that I did not like and I won't tell you which one that was.A good collection of st...
Whew! A breath of fresh air. I've been on a bad streak as of late. I've been forcing myself to get through novels. With one of them, I got so frustrated that I just threw the novel against my dresser with 10 percent left to go. "That's it," I thought to myself. "I don't need to know any more about these dreadful people." These books have all been written exceedingly well. All that style. Zippo heart. Contemporary fiction tends to have a problem with assuming that humanity is the same as sentimen...
I liked The Color Master better than the only other collection by Aimee Bender that I've read, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, but only slightly. It's an interesting comparison - her first collection posed along with the most recent - but it also yields an interesting result: my opinion on the two books is pretty much identical.While I do appreciate Aimee Bender's flair for surreal imagery and ideas, what trouble me is the common thread which runs through her work - the lack of actual stories.
These stories exemplify the now classic structure of contemporary literary fiction: great waves of prose that crest in moments of pure poetry, built on symbolism, introspection, and, above all, angst. Bender re-imagines her own existential crises as outside events, and whether the story features ogres, high school girls, or sex, an overwhelming feeling remains that this is about the author's life. My two favorite stories were Lemonade, about the aforementioned high school girls, where the angst
This is a strong collection of short stories, however, not strong enough to revisit over and over. Ms. Bender fabulously captures the absurdity and surrealism of human interaction; she writes well. Some of her stories in this volume become too meandering or not meandering enough, though. The title story, “The Color Master” is by far the best and, combined with the final story, “The Devourings” redeemed this collection to 4 stars for me. Both stories are included in other anthologies that I own s...
Good short stories are hard to come by and these are an artform.I loved this collection, I love Aimee Bender.I went and bought her other story collections straight away.Aimee - you are the story master, please never stop writing.
The four stars is primarily due to a select few of my very favorites from this collection. The Red Ribbon (The role play of prostitution between a married couple results in the wife being unable to have meaningful sex without payment ever again), Appleless (A magical world where apples forever fall from trees in an orchard), The Doctor & The Rabbi (Touches on the idea of God/Atheism, waiting in a "queue" for prayers: "The best way I can think to describe it,” she said, “is the way, when you’re d...
baby's first (aimee) bender!!and now i see what all the fuss is about. she has a real flair for the fantastic, for the magical fairytale quickstep where suddenly a story about apples becomes a story about sexual assault. it's dream-logic perfection. like all good fairytales, the magical elements are just glossing over those painful universal realities we don't like to examine too closely: the sorrow of a couple ruining themselves, the unwillingness to look too closely at our loved ones, the lies...
I’m only about a 1/3 of the way through this collection of short stories and I’m not normally a short story kind of reader but these are blowing me away and making me think - love her style of writing - my rating may change as I read the rest of the book but somehow I doubt it - can’t wait to read more of her writing
Can I mark a book five stars purely because my own ideas have been going haywire since I started reading it? That seems fair, doesn't it? I have such a love for Aimee Bender despite the fact that I'm not nearly quirky enough to understand half of what she is saying. She gives me pause, though. The kind of pause that is hopeful with regards to my own self and my own abilities. I have lead a life of such rules. Always. This is what you have to do to be an acceptable girl. An acceptable scholar. An...
Hmmmm...this collection of short stories by Aimee Bender was harder for me to get into. It took me longer to read for a start and that's because I read a few which were amazing (Appleless and The Red Ribbon which is one of my favourite short stories - honestly, Bender has a ridiculously imaginative and tender way with words. She causes your heart to ache as she presents you with broken lives and failing marriages) which were then followed by a few I didn't much care for (Faces, Lemonade and Orig...
If you're a willing reader, you'll go everywhere with Aimee Bender. Readers might feel like writers for a bit here, like we're the kid sitting on a grownup's lap while the grownup is driving. For a moment we can glimpse through the windshield of the story. I'm going back for more.
THIS:"In the mornings I write long circular journal entries when I wake up. Too early. Before work. But even though I am making steady proclamations about who I will go for next, and why, and how it will all be different, it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times: the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealings of insecurities. I have said them al...