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Reviewed
by Tania Hershman
It's
no secret that much of fiction is thinly-veiled autobiography. If that
was true of Aimee Bender's Willful
Creatures, her second story collection, then Bender's
siblings are potatoes, she once bought a tiny man in a cage, and she
knows a boy whose fingers are shaped like keys.
These stories
fall under the category of magical realism: from the opening words it
is obvious we are not in the world as we know it. But these are no
simplistic fairy tales, they are not fantastical stories with no
resonance. These stories are all about life and all its twists and
turns: the joys and the disappointments, the pain and the prejudice,
the magic and the tragedy.
Nothing is at
it seems in these stories.
The motherfucker arrived at the West
Coast
from the Mid West
opens a story entitled Motherfucker.
The reader
may expect a tale of a womanizer who is much loathed by his conquests,
but it is not that at all. It is this:
The motherfucker arrived at the West
Coast from the Mid
West.'I fuck mothers,' he said to anyone who asked him. 'And I do it
well,' he added.
In Dearth,
a
woman who lives alone is surprised to find a cast iron pot of potatoes
has appeared. She throws them away, but they keep coming back, and then
they start growing hands and feet. Eventually, she gives up trying to
get rid of them and begins to love them.
Many of the
stories do not
have vegetables which grow limbs or boys with keys for fingers, but
rather it is the style of writing that places them at the more surreal
end of the spectrum. Words do not necessarily come in the traditional
order, sentences are not always finished. There is a rhythm and a
poetry here.
The woman he
met. He met a woman. This woman was the
woman he met
is how the story The
Meeting begins, and you find
yourself carried away by these words as if they were waves, and when
you reach the end of this story, and then end of all of these stories,
even though you may not have understood everything on a rational level,
they have touched you somewhere far deeper.
(This
review first appeared in Transmission
magazine)
Tania
Hershman is
editor of The Short Review. Tania's first short story collection, The
White Road and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Salt Publishing in
September 2008.
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Publisher: Anchor Books
Publication
Date:
August 2006
Paperback/Hardback?
Paperback
First
collection?: No
Author
bio: Aimee
Bender is the author of three books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
(1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own
(2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of
the year, and Willful
Creatures, which was nominated by The Believer as one of
the best books of the year.
Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin
House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and many more, as well as heard
on PRI's This American Life and Selected Shorts. She's received two
Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005.
She lives in Los Angeles, and teaches creative writing at USC.
Read
an interview
with Aimee Bender
Buy this book (used or
new) from:
Author's
recommendation: Powell's
AbeBooks
Amazon
BetterWorldBooks.Com
And...don't
forget your library, local booksellers and independent book shops!
Visit IndieBound.org to find an independent bookstore near
you in the US
If
you liked this book you might also like....
Lorrie Moore "Self
Help"
Roy
Kesey "All
Over"
Aimee
Bender "The
Girl in the Flammable Skirt"
What
other reviewers thought:
Mostly
Fiction
Entertainment
Weekly
Trashotron
Boston Globe
The Believer
SF Chronicle
NPR (audio)
The Potomac
NY Times
Something
Under the Bed is Writing
Wall Street
Journal
PopMatters
LA Weekly
Washington
Post
Village Voice
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