Salon.com > Aimee Bender http://www.salon.com Mon, 28 May 2012 00:30:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Aimee Bender http://www.salon.com/2000/10/05/bender_4/ http://www.salon.com/2000/10/05/bender_4/#comments Thu, 05 Oct 2000 07:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/bender Aimee Bender's stories are modern fairy tales, influenced by such varied writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Italo Calvino, Carol Churchill, Oliver Sacks, James Baldwin, and Garcia Marquez. Not only are they playful, inventive, and full of surprises, they possess a thoughfulness and depth that is rare for such a young writer.

"[Bender] aims to be sneakily incendiary and often succeeds: many of these stories are as catchy as that title, with a winning cheekiness." -New York Times

Listen to Aimee Bender read her story "The Rememberer" from "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt."

Bold Type features an interview and a short story by Aimee Bender.

From "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" ) 1999, Aimee Bender. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Noreproduction of this material is authorized without the express written consent of the Licensor.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/10/05/bender_4/feed/ 0 Count on it http://www.salon.com/2000/08/25/bender_3/ http://www.salon.com/2000/08/25/bender_3/#comments Fri, 25 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/bag/2000/08/25/bender Counting has been on my mind these days, and these five books not only count forward or backward or sideways, they do it in the weirdest, most adventurous ways, reinventing the rules about how to use time and digits in the world of letters.

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

These short stories are narrated by a math equation, from the beginning of the Big Bang, with a few million (or billion) years counted forward in each chapter. How does he do it? This is my favorite book of Calvino's -- it's so funny and warm, and the scope is so wide (what could be wider than the history of the universe?) -- and yet it's truly intimate at the same time.

Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

This novel's narrator finds himself born into the body of a dying man and then counts through his life backwards, including backwards lines of dialogue. We learn slowly about the cumulative effect of a life, in a world where violence heals, babies scramble back in and effect is cause. Amis takes a huge risk here: This one simple shift changes everything and has amazing emotional power.

The Freddie Stories by Lynda Barry

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