Do you ever add books to your wishlist and forget who recommended a book and how you first heard about it and why you wanted to read it? I wish I knew who recommended this book to me....In a sentence, it is one odd book. In this book of short stories, you never know what is going to happen. You might go to school with an imp or an ice girl. Your father might develop a hole through his stomach the size of a soccer ball. You might fall in love with a robber who takes you along on his jobs. The stories don't have a Twilight Zone feel to them; instead, you feel like you are in the real world you've always been in, but you are looking at things very, very carefully, like they really are.

If you add this book to your wishlist after reading this review, and you wait and wait and wait to get a copy of the book, and then the book sits and sits and sits on the shelf, and then, when you finally read it, months from now, and you wonder what you were thinking when you got it...don't blame me...you've been warned.

Aimee Bender mě příjemně překvapila románem The Particular sadness of lemon cake a tak jsem chtěla ochutnat i její prvotinu. Pravda, zpočátku jsem si byla trochu nejistá a lamentovala nad svou špatnou angličtinou, snažíc se přijít např. na to, co by mohl znamenat obrat "my father woke up with a hole in his stomach". Načež jsem se začetla dál a došlo mi, že díra v žaludku je skutečná díra v žaludku a že nikoho zásadně neobtěžuje, ani nikomu nepřekáží. V knize se totiž dějí mnohem divnější věci.
Nad fantazií Aimee Bender skutečně smekám. Pokládáte li se za zběhlé čtenáře, které v textu jen tak něco nepřekvapí, tenhle soubor by vás mohl krapet vyvést z povídkové letargie.
A minimálně jednu povídku by si měly přečíst knihovnice ...

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 quirky cutesy whimsy.

I recently described another five-star short story collection as being like, "Aimee Bender's wrist-slashing bedroom-sulking little sister," despite the fact that, "Aimee Bender, while able to dabble with the grotesque via misleadingly sunny build-ups, doesn't take it to the same heights many of the stories in this collection do." Now, it would be helpful if people had read the book I was comparing this one to, but since I only know of a very small number of people that've read Unclean Jobs For Women and Girls I'll have to try to give a better description.

It's been long enough between reading this and now that I can't conjure up many super specific rehashings of the book. Regardless, I can still recall what it was that I loved about it in general.

The stories, much like many in Ryan Boudinot's Littlest Hitler, spin yarns centered around the fantastical and the bizarre but with a straight face. This is a basic approach to books and film that I love and Ms. Bender pulls it off with a deliciously elegant precision that I find pleasurably enviable as someone who tends to veer into the overly-elaborate when writing. She homes in on that bulls-eye of 'brevity = wit' in a seemingly effortless manner; the arrow plucked and secured, the bow drawn, aimed and triggered all in one graceful, fluid motion.

These couple-of-bites-sized tales tickle the imagination sectors of the brain into lighting up the fMRI read, massage the abdominals with laughter, and gently squeeze the heart at just the right moments. A lovely experience, which momentarily pulled me out of the darkened hallway I was sitting in at the time (overnight shift at a treatment center for juvenile sex offenders) as well as the black hole my head felt like then, for reasons too personal and too raw and probably too boring to elaborate on.

Thanks for that, Aimee.

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 in front of him, he held onto his shoulders. Concentrate hard, he thought. Where are you? Everything felt blank and quiet."

The Rememberer: 3 stars

Call My Name: 2 stars
Narrator is an insipid narcissistic woman, sort of like Sarah Silverman's stage persona but less funny or brilliant.

What You Left in the Ditch: 3.5 stars
“Steven returned from the war without lips.” Amazing premise, but pretty predictable plot choices in the end.

Quiet Please: 4.5 stars
The horny librarian story.

Skinless: 4 stars

Fell This Girl: 2.5 stars
At first I thought the narrator was similar to the narrator of "Call My Name", but Bender takes it farther. I think this is meant to portray a female version of a sociopathic male rapist.

The Healer: 4.5 stars

Loser: 5 stars
Great plotting and possibly the most polished story.

Legacy: 3 stars

The Ring: 3 stars

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: 4 stars
I think this is the most surrealist of all the stories I read in this book. I like the themes of weight and lightness (similar to Milan Kundera).

These stories do what a John Donne poem does--they plunk you down in the middle of action that's already going, present a few rules of whatever world you've landed in, and then let the current carry things away. For example, consider the opening lines of the story The Healer, which is one of my favorites: "There were two mutant girls in town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice. Everyone else's hands were normal." Here's another opening line, from the story Legacy: "The hunchback took in the pregnant girl to hide her from high school until the baby popped out."

The premise of many of the stories is bizarre or grotesque, but so well done that you don't stop to question it...at least, not much. I gave it 5 stars but the stories aren't flawless. I was just so surprised by them--in a very good way--that I loved the book.

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.

I LOVE Aimee Bender. These short stories are so beautiful and filled with emotion. Bender does not let the limits of "reality" or the confines of narrative structure interfere with her storytelling. How can you not love characters with hands of fire and ice, a high school mermaid who drinks beer through her hair, an atypical lonely librarian? Bender finds the humanity in each character and honesty in every situation she imagines.

I read The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and found it bitter, brittle and melancholy. It's a book of short stories and they are very memorable and well written stories. She uses a lot of magical realism in them, like in the story of the father who woke up with a hole going straight through his body, though he remained in perfect health and the one with the stolen ruby that turns everything it touches red. But the characters and their relationships are superficial and facile. Not in the way they are written, but in themselves. I had also run across one of the stories in this collection online a couple years ago. It was on an erotica website, I believe.

Aimee Bender writes with great economy - her stories are concise and feel a bit like prose poetry. However, I prefer more character focus, and most in this book seemed terribly flat, mere vehicles for the next strange occurrence. It all seems so detached, even when narrated in the first person.

I loved the first story in the collection, “The Rememberer” - I had seen it somewhere else in some anthology or other, and was delighted to re-read it. It’s about a woman whose partner is evolving backwards into lower forms of life (ape, salamander, etc.), as she steels herself for his eventual disappearance into a microorganism. It just as easily could have been about watching one’s partner slip away due to any number of illnesses, and loving each progressively weaker incarnation of him.

I didn’t like any of the rest of the stories nearly as much as the first. I felt continually disappointed, waiting for punchlines or metaphors or epiphanies that never arrived.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Stile nervoso, essenziale
Mondi strani e improbabili e al tempo stesso terribilmente veri, iper-reali
capaci di mettere a nudo le nostre paure ,le nostre ossessioni, i nostri desideri più profondi
In alcuni racconti è come camminare a piedi nudi sulla battigia ,tra pezzi di vetro
Non ci sono sussurri ,lo dice bene il titolo della raccolta
Ce n'è uno che potrebbe avere come colonna sonora
Smack my bitch up dei Prodigy https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5kQ6C8c...#
anzi , è scritto come fosse quel video, crudo , spiazzante ,uno dei migliori
(assomiglia ad un film girato con il telefonino ,come tipo di approccio )

Straniante ma interessante la scrittura di Aimée Bender
3/4 stelle

‘The Rememberer’ is my favourite in the collection. The rest are less exciting for me, unfortunately.