Aimee Bender

Cult cartoonist David Stromberg has been dubbed "Thurber on speed" at the legendary Gotham Book Mart. It's easy to see why in the weird world of Baddies, an absurdist graphic collection of gags, ideas, and late night thoughts that harkens back to the days of witty New Yorker cartoonists . . . even as it seems so edgy as to be completely new.Baddies looks aslant at everyday life, unearthing its most hilarious and ridiculous aspects amidst even our darkest fears and phobias. Inhabited by an antic and eclectic assortment of odd-ball characters, who star in chapters such as "Action and Its Doubt," "The Day and Its Battle," "Mystery and Its Carnality," these captioned cartoons capture a world forever veering off from the normal, the rational, and the "well adjusted."And they introduce us to a startlingly original artist, where the art and the writerly wit combine in a way that's both disarmingly funny and strangely familiar, not to mention refreshingly, bitingly smart.

The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents -- her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact -- she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world. As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood?Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.

______________________________________LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD'[A] compact surrealist memory box of a novel .

In these tales, with one foot firmly planted in the present, Maxwell brings a certain sophisticated urbanity to the oral traditions of the fable and fairy tale. The total effect is of something midway between the Brothers Grimm and Kafka, with perhaps a touch of Zen. (NYRB April 1966) While modern enough in locale and context, they are as old as humanity itself in what concerns them. And always that voice, the age old voice of the storyteller, the eternal magic of the speaking human voice. Such simplicity takes true artistry and Maxwell has that in spades."

A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband in 'The Red Ribbon' and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre in 'The Devouring' and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children.

In Willful Creatures Aimee Bender takes us on a journey to a fantastical world in which authentic love blossoms.

In The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Aimee Bender has created a world where nothing is quite as it seems. These stories of men and women whose lives are shaped and sometimes twisted by the power of extraordinary desires take us to a place far beyond the imagination.

When Mona Gray is ten, her father contracts a mysterious illness. When she becomes a maths teacher, Mona delights her pupils by encouraging them to find objects that take the form of numbers.

_______________________________On the eve of her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice. To her horror, she finds that her cheerful mother tastes of despair. Soon, she's privy to the secret knowledge that most families keep hidden: her father's detachment, her mother's transgression, her brother's increasing retreat from the world. But there are some family secrets that even her cursed taste buds can't discern.

The Writer's Notebook compiles the best craft seminars in the history of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, along with a variety of craft essays from some of Tin House's favorite writers. The cast of deeply respected poets and prose writers explore topics that vary from writing dialogue to the dos and don'ts of writing about sex. With how-tos, close readings, and personal anecdotes, The Writer's Notebook offers aspiring scribes advice and inspiration to hone their own craft.

"Contemporary fairy tales, cushioned by goofy humor and a deep tenderness for her characters, that aren't always as dark or as sinister as they initially appear." --The New York Times Book Review Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

Some of today's leading young authors contribute a vast array of short stories all inspired by popular songs, in an anthology featuring selections by Julianna Baggot, David Ebershoff, Amanda Davis, Neal Pollack, Tom Perrotta, Rebecca Wells, Nelson George, Greil Marcus, Ernesto Quinonez, J. T. Leroy, and others. Original.

Aimee Bender's stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can't stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built fa ade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.

"A collection of wistful, witty stories." --Esquire "Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty." --Harper's Bazaar A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips? Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending. Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer. A 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best works of fiction of 1998.