The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories [Paperback]

Aimee Bender (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 17, 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In conventional fiction, war heroes return home minus an arm or a leg--or, to take Hemingway's worst-case scenario, the family jewels. In Aimee Bender's deeply unconventional collection, however, an even more suggestive body part goes AWOL: "Steve returned from the war without his lips." The army doctors have temporarily replaced them with a plastic disc, which impairs his speech. Luckily, this doesn't prevent him and his wife from engaging in some slightly surrealistic sexual maneuvers: "That night in bed, he grazed the disc over her raised nipples like a UFO and the plastic was cool on her skin. It felt like they were in college and toying with desk items as sexual objects."

That same combo--sex and off-kilter surrealism--provides Bender with her modus operandi. In "Call My Name," for example, a young heiress tails a stranger back to his apartment, gets her dress sliced off, and then consents to be trussed to a chair while he watches a TV documentary about Mozart. "Quiet Please" features a libidinous librarian who takes on all, uh, comers in the back room. Bender isn't, it should be said, simply a purveyor of French postcards. Her prose is exquisitely shaped, and its singsong rhythms suggest something out of a wised-up, whacked-out fairy tale. Indeed, if the Brothers Grimm had been a little more attuned to the pleasure principle, their fables might have boasted at least a family resemblance to Aimee Bender's. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The wise, highly original 16 stories in Bender's debut collection take place at the intersection of fairy tale and everyday life, of hilarity and heartbreak. From the book's first sentence ("My lover is experiencing reverse evolution"), it's clear that this world is far from ordinary. As the lover in the story ("The Rememberer") moves from ape to sea turtle to salamander, the reader moves from startled dislocation to delight. After this strong opening, what follows is equally good and equally surprising. The plots range from the unexpected to the fantastic: a woman gives birth to her own mother; in an effort to drive away grief, a bereaved librarian seduces man after man in the library's back room; a mermaid and an imp enjoy a high-school romance; an orphaned boy develops an uncanny talent for finding lost objects. As Bender explores a spectrum of human relationships, her perfectly pitched, shapely writing blurs the lines between prose and poetry. While full of funny moments, these tales are neither slight nor glib. They recognize that to be human is to be immensely fragile, and their characters are always unmistakably human. In "What You Left in the Ditch," a woman whose husband has returned from the war without lips tells her teenage lover, "The most unbearable thing I think by far... is hope," yet hopeAthat isolation and grief are temporary, that love exists, that the ugly can be made beautifulAis what she and all the stories' bruised and lonely characters insist on. Bender's is a unique and compassionate voice, and her debut is a string of jewels. First serial to Granta, GQ and Story; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (August 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780385492164
• ISBN-13: 978-0385492164
• ASIN: 0385492162
• Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 5.2 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (94 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #74,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Strange, startling, and original short fiction December 8, 2003

By Debbie Lee Wesselmann TOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Aimee Bender's stories are perhaps some of the strangest being published in contemporary literature. With her surreal touch and a nod toward the Brother Grimm, this, her first collection, reads like a series of quick dreams - some disturbing, some funny, and all without regard to the laws of reality. The opening story, "Call My Name", begins the collection with the promise of convention, albeit it an off-kilter one, when a woman follows a man home, hoping to seduce him, only to discover that he has a simple but strange desire that only marginally involves her. While the emotions and situation in this story are odd, they don't prepare the reader for the first line of the next story, "Steven returned from the war without lips." None of Bender's characters are whole, whether they have an actually soccer-ball size hole in their stomachs ("Marzipan"), whether they are imps and mermaids in cognito ("Drunken Mimi"), or whether they are grieving for loved ones. In "Quiet Please," a librarian whose father has just died fulfills the librarian fantasies of several male patrons until she meets one whose extraordinary feats of strength finally exposes her emotional pain. In a line that applies to all the stories, the librarian acknowledges that "it's hard to tell the difference between fantasy and reality."

These odd, rambunctious, and startling stories are not for the literal-minded, but they will charm those who like their short fiction with an irreverent edge.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best Books this Literature Major has ever Read May 23, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

After reading through the stories in this collection over three times, I have to say that Aimee Bender is one of the best new writers I've read in years. Her stories are language-driven, impacted with brilliant images and NEW ways of describing emotions and situations that are universal. Perhaps this is why some commentators have declared that she is only out for the outlandish and bizarre, and hasn't spent a day in the real world. It's because she's not going the old, well-traveled route to show us life in all its darkness and glory. Also, any slightly savvy reader would see that she's working with form and structure, adopting the speed and economy and shocking language of fairy tales and applying it to tell modern stories. Some reviewers have said that her characters aren't connected to the world or even to their own selves, as though this is something Ms. Bender doesn't realize. They seem to see this as a weakness of hers. Perhaps they've failed to realize that Bender's characters being disconnected from society and their own selves is her point. And a poignant one, too. She's awesome. I'll re-read these stories for the rest of my life.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Original, surreal, imaginative--not for the TV zombie April 29, 2001

By Nanci

Format:Paperback

These stories remind me of Francesca Lia Block, but even more surreal. I read the book in one evening. Many times I came away puzzled, or turning the page for the rest of the story, but it is so refreshing in these days of computers and Canned TV, ads and radio to find someone with true Imagination that I have to give her 5 stars. I read "the Healing" in Story Magazine, and had to go find more of Aimee. I don't think the stories are necessarily deep. Existential--maybe. Poetry, yes--if poetry is a love affair with words. I'd rate her as a wonderful writer. Wish I had that talent.