From pumpkin-heads to men-pets to a key-fingered boy, from potato-children to an evil mango craving to doctors giving wrong death dates to their patients, this little collection of surreal, metaphorical stories will have you scream in horror for more. I swallowed it, wishing it never stopped. But then it did. Damn. If you love my dark writing, you will love this with a lusty, death-craving love. Yes, there is such a thing in literature. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

Brilliant.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” ― Franz Kafka, The MetamorphosisIn an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez I read way back in the late eighties, I remember the author saying that this one sentence started him on the road to literature. Until then, he had not known "people were allowed to write like this"!This is what sets literature apart from all other arts - infinite freedom. The medium lets one create what...

Re-read 14/5/19 4.5 starsStill a favourite short story collection of mine but there might be one or two stories that weren’t as good as the others. My favourites are definitely Off, The Meeting, Ironhead, Fruit and Nuts and The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers. If you’re feeling in an experimental mood and want to try some surrealist fiction, please check out this collection. ————————————Stop what you're reading and pick up this treasure of a book NOW! Willful Creatures was given to me as a g...

I'm not sure I can star-rate books of short fiction. Some of these stories (e.g., "Off") I loved so much that I nearly cried when I read them, while others (e.g., "Fruit and Words") I hated to the point of becoming physically ill. In her dart-throwing at axes mapping "Whimsical Quirk" and "Nihilistic Depravity," Bender does on occasion hit some sublime points. I'd read "Off" in an anthology, and it was like doing some weird new exercise that doesn't feel all that special at the time, but the nex...

Reading Aimee Bender is like waking up one morning to find yourself swimming inside a terracotta bowl of guacamole and accepting it. You pull yourself out of the bowl, hoisting yourself over the lip, towel off and head to work. Maybe you catch yourself longing for the green smoothness of the morning as you sit through a meeting. Wondering if it will happen again. It does. Only the next morning you are fished out by a spoon. Weird. My favorite stories here are "The End of the Line," "Motherfucker...

He stood with the starlet for a while and told her he was a graduate student at the school for emotional ventriloquists. She raised one carefully shaped eyebrow. "No," he said, "it's true." She laughed. "No," he said, "it's true. You throw your emotions on other people in the room," he explained, "and see what they do then.""So what do they do?" she asked, keeping that perfect eyebrow halfway up her forehead."It depends," he sighed. "Sometimes they lob them right back at you."Once again, Aimee B...

This is the second time I've read this book and I think maybe this time I enjoyed it even more. I know when you have a library of 700+ unread books it's silly to go back to something you've already experienced but The Colour Master kind of got me writing again and so it seemed only natural to turn  back and  revisit the other quirks of Aimee Bender. The richness of the bizarre in these books just soothes my soul. I feel massively influenced by Aimee's writing, which I suppose is weird. If you re...

Entertaining and unusual. I found it a bit up and down in quality.

Sasha leant me this book with a cursory order to read it when I had the time. It took me quite a while to get to it, but I did, and I'm quite glad of that, too. I've not read a collection of short stories in a while, and when it comes to short stories, I can be rather particular. I grew up on a fair bit of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson with some Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King mixed in. Well. Aimee Bender did not disappoint.This isn't to say that her writing is automatically...

I am on a short story streak. Three in a row. This book published in 2005 was “Discarded from Pima County Library System” for some reason in 2006. I wonder why? Ten men go to ten doctors. All the doctors tell all the men that they only have two weeks left to live. Five men cry. Three men rage. One man smiles. The last man is silent, meditative. Okay, he says. He has no reaction. The raging men, upon meeting in the lobby, don’t know what to do with the man of no reaction. They fall upon him and k...

"What's interesting in a story isn't the situation," said Amy Hempel, quoting her instructor at Columbia, Gordon Lish, "it's the people in it and how they respond to it."So with Bender. Of course the cover has a picture of a little man in a cage - that's what happens when the little men hunters capture a little man and sell him to a big man. Big whup. The story comes in when we see how the big man deals with his new power, and how the little people have prepared for such abuses.Bender writes in

I didn't even mean to start reading this collection. I'd been taking my time between books by reading various lit mags, and was so taken by Bender's story in an old issue of Tin House that I picked up her book. It had been on my shelf for over a year, and suddenly I was reading story after story--4 or so at a time. They are all swift reads, the prose simple and lovely, all of them strange: a boy has keys for hands, a woman raises potatoes as her children, a motherfucker (literally, he fucks moth...

A collection of really unique stories told by an extremely magical writing style. I'm excited to read more by this author.

I Don't Do Reviews.It's true. I don't. But I do like to mention books I've enjoyed, and I've not enjoyed anything more than Willful Creatures, by Aimee Bender in a long time.So where to start? Well, the book's a collection of short stories, fifteen in all. And they're fantastic and I mean, REALLY fantastic. I ordered the book from my library after reading a review of it in The Short Review. The first story grabbed my attention, it was like being grabbed by the throat, to tell the truth. And afte...

I really want to like Aimee Bender...but based on this collection I think she's overhyped. For one thing, all the press about Bender as a fantasist or magical-realism practitioner is GROSSLY overstated. Most of the stories in here are straight-up realistic, and only a few are outright fantastical. Not that there's anything wrong with that—I'm just saying there's some false advertising going on.The stories are all slightly on the quirky side but most of them are so wispy and minor-key that they d...

Much as it usually is with me, this collection was a mixed bag tending more towards the negative than otherwise. Some, however, are quite heartfelt, both happily and not: "End of the Line", "Dearth", and "The Leading Man" are the best of the bunch, with "Hymn"and (view spoiler)["Motherfucker" (hide spoiler)] (yes, that's the actual title) in second tier, the rest being a bit too stolid and/or melodramatic in the suburban nuclear WASP family or Gaiman sense to appeal much. At its best, it reminde...

many, apparently coffee induced claps A solid contribution to an otherwise brilliant and unparallelled collection of writing. I can't in any simple words express how much I enjoy this author. These short stories may not hold up against the glory of her previous work, but they come pretty darn close. Each is a combination of dark, but also has elements of hope, self discovery, and a lot of potential for our main characters. These characters evolve, recognizing their own flaws, and accomplish some...

Willful Creatures Stories by Aimee BenderNew York: Doubleday & Company$22.95 – 208 pagesThe man went to the pet store to buy himself a little man to keep him company. The pet store was full of dogs with splotches and shy cats coy and the friendly people got dogs and the independent people got cats and this man looked around until in the back he found a cage inside of which was a miniature sofa and tiny TV and one small attractive brown-haired man wearing a tweed suit. He looked at the price tag....