Willful Creatures : Stories

The author of the dazzling novel An Invisible Sign of My Own and the critically acclaimed story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt returns with more sublime, beguiling, and breathtakingly original stories of love, sex, heartbreak, and potato babies. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotions, Aimee Bender has gained a passionate following among readers and critics. The San Francisco Chronicle greeted her first story collection with rapturous praise, declaring, "Once in a while a writer comes along who makes you grateful for the very existence of language." Her debut novel was called "as light as a zephyr and unique as a snowflake" (Washington Post), "a seductively smart read" (Glamour), and "surreal, edgy, and endearing all at once" (USA Today). Bender is a brilliant stylist, using language with the nimble grace of a magician. She conjures surreal worlds in which authentic emotion blooms. A woman's children may be potatoes, but the love she feels for them is heartbreakingly real. A boy with keys as fingers is seen not as a freak but as a hero. Bender infuses even inanimate objects with human warmth. Rendering grief, loneliness, hope, love, and happiness with exquisite subtlety and cleverness, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

Aimee Bender is the author of the short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and other magazines, and have been heard on PRI’s This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles.