I hadn't actually planned on reading this book quite yet, but I had taken it up to my bedroom and set it on the nightstand, and just picked it up one evening even though I was still finishing my book for book club. I read the first story and knew I was going to enjoy these stories. It was just so strange, and whimsical, and yet also poignant.

A lot of the stories read and/or are structured like fairy tales, only modern day and not ones you've ever read. I particularly liked the story Drunken Mimi because I'm interested in what different writers do with mermaids and this was certainly an interesting use of mermaid.

Another stand out to me was The Healer, about two mutant girls: one with an ice hand and one with a fire hand. It was startling and sad and interesting and unexpected. The Ring was another story that stood out to me and that I enjoyed, it was strange and I enjoyed it.

Marzipan was perhaps one of the weirder better ones and for that I enjoyed it a lot. Dad has a hole in his stomach? Mom gave birth to Grandma? What?

I moved right along through these. I lost a little momentum when I got to Fugue and the Girl in the Flammable Skirt, but Aimee Bender is a fascinating writer and overall I really enjoyed the book.

First, I need to get something off my chest - Aimee Bender is a DREAM! Simply put, she is a wonderful writer with a rich, unusual and surreal imagination.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the second collection of short stories I have had the pleasure of reading by Bender and once again, she does not disappoint. Here, tales including a girl with a hand made of fire and a girl with a hand made of ice (The Healer), a librarian with a voracious and reckless appetite for sex (Quiet Please), and the overwhelming sense of loss and loneliness which only becomes apparent when an object is delivered by mistake (The Bowl) are just some of the zany stories featured in this wonderful invention of a book.

Aimee Bender has an utterly unique way with words, with her narration, with her description and with what she chooses to reveal to her readers. Her stories are often quietly devastating with a poignant subtlety many writers attempt to achieve and fail to pull off. This does not apply to Bender though, who crafts her stories with so much love and care, it is impossible not to fall hard for her evocative and poetic style. She creates stories the same way a baker creates cakes, pouring themselves into the mix as they work, adding their signature touch to their invention.

For me, the stories which stood out, were the subtle ones which hinted at a bigger, and sometimes devastating, sometimes beautiful, picture.

'Drunken Mimi' is quite possibly one of my favourite short stories ever, and the most poetic depiction of an orgasm:

"Her purple eyes were purpler and he thought he smelled flowers."

'Call My Name' focuses on a woman who wants to feel desired by men, she wants to feel like she is in control of them, manipulating their emotions, and yet, we discover the man is actually in the driving seat. It also focuses on identity, femininity, sexuality and presents us with a highly complex relationship between two strangers.

A sense of loss and regret is all too pervasive in 'The Bowl', a relatively simple story which masks a plethora of heartache beneath its surface.

'Quiet Please' documents a librarian's hunger for sex with users. I work in a library and I can tell you now, that this does not happen!!! (At least I don't think it does!) Despite her uncharacteristic behaviour, she is an incredibly fragile character like so many of the people collected in this book.

The ending of 'Skinless' holds so much tension; it is like standing on a knife's edge waiting for the bite of the blade to draw blood and make you real again.

'Fugue' is possibly one of the hardest stories to sum up since it possesses a beautiful tenderness and fragility. There are various scenarios involving different characters who interlink but beneath the seemingly mundane daily routine, there is despair, a sense of desperation and longing which goes unfulfilled. I think this story embodies the spaces in between, the words which often go unsaid and result in profound consequences.

Finally, the last story I loved was 'The Healer' - a story about two girls, one with a hand of fire, the other with a hand of ice, who equalise each other when their hands meet. Again, a deeply affecting and poetic tale about their encounters, and the desperate act one of them commits in order to be free of her "burden".

I am indebted to a fellow goodreads member who introduced me to the wonderfully fantastic, surreal and unusual world of Aimee Bender, an author whose voice I want to drown in again and again and again.

If you want a book which might just change your life and your perception of the short story then The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the perfect fit.

I'm struggling to find good words to write about this book. From the beginning until the end, it seemed to me nothing but a random arrangement of some pretty far-fetched and shiny ideas together to form a incoherent collection.

I don't think if these pieces are to be called stories, and if they are, I'm pretty sure I didn't like them one bit. Everything in this book was designed so randomly that you were not even forced to find any meaning or intent between the lines. It was not even a blur, through which you could see something if you looked with great patient or efficacy. No, that was not the case at all.

There are some pretty good books written in magical realism. I don't particularly like the style, but I don't deny its power to convey some prudence about human life though strong and witty metaphors. This book, however, was apparently written in magical realism just for the sake of magical realism. At the end of it, I was left with lots of 'magical' ideas, whose purpose seemed only to shock and amaze, nothing more. It felt gimmicky, functionless and in gaseous form.

With this book, I have read over 50 stories from American literature over a period of two weeks, and I am highly disappointed right now. This is highly unexpected. Perhaps, I am picking the wrong books, I don't know.

I really struggled to maintain interest in this book. The stories are meant to be satirical and nonsensical—and there are indeed some plotlines that will make you laugh—but the whole thing ends up feeling shallow and scatterbrained.

The first section of the book features the same type of protagonist in most of the stories: she’s vain, vapid, and horny. A librarian learns that her father died and proceeds to sleep with every man in the library one day. A narcissistic airhead follows a guy home from the subway and convinces him to cut an expensive dress off of her but gets angry when he doesn’t want to sleep with her.

The writing is fine overall, but the stories really lacked depth. Something like this might have worked better if the stories were long enough to develop more than one-note characters. I kept pushing through the chapters, hoping the next would be better, but I never found a character I cared about.

Maybe you just need to drink a lot of wine before reading this.

Aimee Bender is very well known in the magical realism world, especially for her novel The Particular Sadness of the Lemon Cake. This is my first experience with her work but it definitely won't be my last. There are sixteen stories in under 200 pages so each one is very short but I think that the length of the stories were judged perfectly. None of the stories felt like they were two slow and each one felt distinct and memorable, though some definitely more than others.

Short story collections aren't usually something I gravitate towards but I've read a couple this year and this is definitely my favourite. Aimee Bender's writing style and imagery really hooked me into this collection and I will be picking up more of her work in the future. Each story had a darkness to it, some raw and emotional, others disturbing and sexual, but I really enjoyed this collection overall and would highly recommend it.

Enigmatic, whimsical, dark & dirty. The author doesnt confine herself to the traditional writing style & her stories are out of this world.

Una raccolta di racconti piuttosto inquietanti con i loro finali bruschi e aperti.
In molti dei racconti c'è il tema del padre invalido, o comunque della malattia presunta o immaginaria, che è una caratteristica di molti racconti e romanzi della Bender. Mi sembra che abbia anche una fissa con i negozi di ferramenta...

*3 stars overall*

Happened upon this at the bookstore today and picked it up because we read The Rememberer in my fiction writing class this semester and that was really good.

Fair warning, if you don't like being confused by magical realism pieces this collection probably isn't for you.

I am so fascinated by all of these stories that are never about what you think they’re about. Maybe they’re not about anything. They’re vignettes of beautiful absurdity with no neat how to tie up the loose ends. It’s magical realism so magical it’s not even realism. Each story is sexy, gross, macabre, titillating.

After going through the first three short stories I wrote one word on my journal: peculiar. Now, after having read every single one of them, I find myself going back to it. I honestly believe peculiar fits this collection of short stories like a glove.

I must confess that at first the what the hell am I reading line crossed my mind. The characters were so beyond everything that I simply couldn't bond, couldn't understand. I was growing slightly frustrated. What was the point of reading these? Simply appreciating the brilliant landscape painted by Aimee Bender's extraordinary writing and ignoring what was happening inside the train? Mind you, that would have made this book already more than worth reading. But then... then Quiet Please happened. Not only was it extremely clever, it was heartbreakingly beautiful. There was so much power, so much rawness. And the absurdity that would have made me shake my head? It just made it more poignant. From that moment on, I found myself looking at these stories from a different point of view, with a different set of eyes. That was how I fell in love with Fugue and its wonderful line,

"But truthfully? Let me tell you what I honestly think.
I think, maybe he hasn't even noticed that I'm gone.

But. I have."

Also The Healer and its glorious,

"I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them closer."

And then came Loser and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt with my favourite line of the whole collection,

"But what I keep wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was the candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?"

From the very beginning I was trying to bond with these characters which only tells me one thing: Aimee Bender is one brilliant writer. She gives these bizarre people, and situations, so much life that they become real, become possible in your mind. I think that's fascinating.

All in all, it was quite an interesting experience. Peculiar, most definitely, but rather worth it.

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. [I also admire the way Bender navigates the tragedy and the inherent humor in that narrator's disposition; how her self-delusion/narcissism is both very, very sad and very, very funny.]

Over the past few days, I decided to give the whole collection a read-through and see if I couldn't hang my hat on the stories that came after these two favorites as well. As was the case in high school, there are still a few of these stories I just did not, for lack of a better word, get. A story like "Marzipan," though I much enjoyed the sentence-level writing and thought the premise itself was inventive, still left me unsatisfied and feeling like I'd missed the set-up, the punchline, or both. I felt that way about a few other stories, too—like "Legacy" and "Drunken Mimi." While I don't doubt there's intention at work in those stories, it was certainly lost on me.

That said, I love so fiercely the other stories in this collection that I quickly forgive those stories [and "The Healer," too, which seems to be a favorite here but left me puzzled] and applaud the rest. "What You Left in the Ditch," "Fugue," "Dreaming in Polish,"—these are wonderful stories. My favorite story of the bunch, though, is "Skinless." If you held a gun to my head I couldn't tell you why, only that it made me feel immensely hopeful and inestimably sad at the same time, which is the work of short fiction. Which leads me to what I've come away with after the re-read: the idea that, in Bender's stories, understanding is not nearly as important as evocation. What the stories bring to the surface in the reader surely matters more than anything else.

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 dumb bitch in completely different plot lines. I couldn't escape her. When the stories weren't about these bimbos they were just random, rambling stories centering on one weird occurrence and ending up nowhere. There was no plot or point to any of these stories. The only saving grace, and the only reason I gave it 2 stars instead of 1, is because occasionally the author would write some pretty cool descriptions. But a few pretty sentences are not worth it. Now I'm not sure if I should even try  The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake since this one was so disappointing. Boo.