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 lived, these stories are NOT lifted from her own life experience, but are born, instead, from a delightfully twisted imagination.

Take a look at the first lines from some of her strange tales:

~Steven returned from the war without lips.

~One week after his father died, my father woke up with a hole in his stomach.

~There was an imp who went to high school with stilts on so that no one would know he was an imp.

~There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice.

~The hunchback took in the pregnant girl to hide her from high school until the baby popped out.

Well, okay...maybe Aimee WAS once cared for by a hunchback, but the rest of that stuff - ZOWIE! - pure imagination!
Her work is sad and sweet and charming and delightful and purely FICTITIOUS!
I LOVE IT! And if you're sick of fiction that seems a bit too much like real life, you might LOVE IT, too.

Surreal short stories with a distinctive voice.

The thing is, she is a wonderfully whimsical writer, but it is a little more weird than I like. There were barely any stories in this collection that did not fall into the category of, well, magical but not realism really at all... These were Call My Name (Random Guy refuses to fall for a hot, naked girl, going so far as to cut her dress from her, yet still proceeding to watching a game show in nonchalance), Loser (An orphan has a talent for locating lost items), & The Healer (Fire & Ice Powers in a small city). I also liked "The Bowl" for purely stylistic reasons (written in a "Choose Uour Oen Adventure" style; "You randomly receive a bowl, green on the outside, white inside. Wondering why, you go into work the next day to find your boss dead...).

Other than that, well written, but not what I like. I like cute magical realism. Innovative, creative, fantastical, magical. More realism. At least a realistic magical conceptualization (read: Sarah Addison Allen).

Recensione anche sul mio blog:
http://pleaseanotherbook.tumblr.com/p...

“La ragazza con la gonna in fiamme” è una raccolta di racconti di Aimee Bender edita in Italia da Minimum Fax. L’ho recuperata dopo aver letto L’inconfondibile tristezza della torta al limone che mi aveva molto affascinato anche se magari non pienamente convinto. E l’ho comprato come regalo d’addio a Firenze nella libreria Leggermente che mi ha adottato durante il mio soggiorno nella terra di Dante. Eppure sono totalmente presa dal magic realism, quel miscuglio di realtà e fantasy, inconsistenza paranormale e incredibile contemporaneità, da essere risucchiata dalle atmosfere incantate della Bender.

Questo libro ha accompagnato gran parte delle mie mattinate a Torino nella calma serafica della colazione. Un racconto a mattina, con la calma di una giornata tutta da vivere e la disattenzione che quasi mi portava a rovesciare il caffè, tanta era la concentrazione di una lettura incantevole, sotto lo sguardo esterrefatto del mio manager. Ma sono stata completamente rapita dall’atmosfera a volte decadente, a volte sorprendente e quasi mai speranzosa di questa raccolta. La Bender è mutevole, con un caleidoscopio di situazioni ed emozioni che poi referenziano sempre alla stessa natura spezzata, a quel male di vivere che coinvolge e sconvolge. Una raccolta molto interessante, che unisce il gusto del macabro, alla ricerca ossessiva di una salvezza che sembra impossibile da raggiungere. La maggior parte dei racconti conservano una tristezza di fondo, una sorta di rassegnazione ancestrale che si confronta con il moto ricorrente di una disfatta sia fisica che morale. Ogni racconto racchiude una possibilità, un mondo meraviglioso che si scontra con il realismo di personaggi che non ci credono fino in fondo, che cadono, crollano e in definitiva perdono. Sembrano tutti inconciliabili eppure il fil rouge che li unisce sono i pregiudizi da cui siamo continuamente condizionati e bloccati, quella voglia di avere di più che ci spinge anche ad atti violenti, imperdonabili e a volte volgari. Ognuno di noi è imprigionato da paure instabili e inconsapevoli e ricerca la via di fuga. Siamo in continua corsa, contro il tempo e contro noi stessi e la Bender mette in luce le nostre bassezze, disegnandole con il pennello spietato di un paranormale che rifulge incendiario.

Il particolare da non dimenticare? Uno specchio…

Una raccolta di racconti magici e riflessivi, in cui perdersi per comprendere le nostre paure e i nostri desideri in una fantasmagorica sfilata di personaggi irreali e situazioni reali, in una contrapposizione affascinante e unica.
Buona lettura guys!

3.5. Imaginative. Heavy on personification. Preferred the stories in the first section over the latter two - more state of mind stories.

While I admire Bender's imagination and bold writing style, I couldn't help feeling like many of these stories were "thin." Each had an alluring premise, peculiar characters and events, but were written in such a way that they all felt like drafts to me that had never been fully fleshed out, developed, and revised. My favorite stories in this collection are the ones that felt the most complete to me and all happen to be in the third and last section: "The Healer," "The Loser," and "The Ring."

This book was well written and I got through it quickly once I switched from one story a day to just reading through it. However the content was not for me. I did not feel invested in any character of any of the short stories and spent most of the time feeling frustrated and confused. I am glad I pushed through and finished the book but it was not a good fit for me.

This descended from a 3-star to 1-star, the more stories I read. There were three notable stories: Quiet Please; Call My Name; What You Left in the Ditch. The theme that knits these short stories and the others in this book together is sex applied as a balm.

In these three stories the protagonists make an internal journey between their sexual conquests and quandaries, AND the author seems engaged enough in the story to develop the dark corners of the stories she flashes a light onto. For example, in Quiet Please, the author links a fairy mural and a father's death and three succinct and well-crafted times this pairing rises above the tumults in the back room.

On the other hand, in Fell This Girl, the author seems to have lost the desire to develop the familial relationship that seems to be the dark corner in this story, after mentioning it several times--even going so far as pick around a weight issue. But in the end the author throws the story and the girl out the window.

Most other stories do not get their dark corners picked at--they just get mentioned, as if the reader is suppose to imbue meaning to a tag line here and there. I truly was getting angry at the editor and publisher for the waste. Under my breath I was scolding the author, for using her name recognition and speeding towards publication, rather than putting her unfinished stories back in a figurative oven, as there were quite unfinished.

I could see a germ of a creative breath in the stories I disliked. They seemed to have come from a creative writing exercise--what would happen if.... But that would be just a story start. Sometimes stories worth sharing in print have to be relinguished to a file cabinet until insight descends to illuminate its corners.

These short stories were, for me, a reminder of why fiction exists. They are raw, boundary-pushing, and relatable in ways you'd never admit to on your own. I only wished there were more.

When I read Aimee Bender, I feel like I'm swimming, and things are floating by.

The book starts with the story about a woman who's lover is devolving. You think that this was some sort of Benjamin Button thing, but what you're seeing is a man who is now an ape and progressing back towards that single-celled organism everyone says we're evolved from. While you're reading this woman trying to cope with a man who is an ape, you also hear about her struggle to love someone like this. What do you do when something unfortunate happens to your lover? I'm pretty sure you would understand the character's POV in this case.

This is what you come across while reading The Girl in the Flammable Skirt; stories that don't quite make sense but deep down you understand where the characters are coming from. It was like reading Murakami with a little performance by Miranda July with the voice of Ernest Hemingway.

And this is the central theme of all the stories you read here. Each one has some quirk about it. It can be about a woman trying to fall back in love with her husband after he returns from war without his lips. It could be a story about a man who develops a hole in his torso. It could be the woman who falls in love with a thief and steals a ruby ring that turns the ocean red. These quirks are little, but remind me so strongly of Murakami; the magical realism of something so inane yet so impactful on the characters' lives. It's almost inconsequential how it shows up, but it impacts them the most throughout the story.

But overall, I wasn't that big of a fan of this story. It was fun and interesting to see the different ways these characters confront certain situations, but I kind of shrug my shoulders at this. It was a fun read, but not one of my top favorites and kind of meh. I wish I was so enamored by it, but perhaps I'm the wrong person to read this. I've been reading magical realism for a while and this book was written in the 90s probably during a time when this kind of writing was considered more poetic than anything else. Perhaps you'll like it. I'm not sure, but for me it was okay. Good stories. Good times. Like the roar of a fireplace; warm, relaxing, and ultimately extinguishable.

If you are in the market for some quirky, off the wall short stories you have found your new favorite author.