Willful Creatures, Aimee Bender
Willful Creatures, Aimee Bender
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Willful Creatures
Stories

Author: Aimee Bender

Narrator: Kirby Heyborne, Jorjeana Marie, Alex McKenna

Unabridged: 4 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/13/2021

Synopsis

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.

About Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, which was a New York Times Notable Book; An Invisible Sign of My Own, which was a Los Angeles 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. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and was nominated for the TipTree Award in 2005. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on November 14, 2015

Reading Aimee Bender is like waking up one morning to find yourself swimming inside a terracotta bowl of guacamole and accepting it. You pull yourself out of the bowl, hoisting yourself over the lip, towel off and head to work. Maybe you catch yourself longing for the green smoothness of the morning......more

Goodreads review by Nadine Rose on February 07, 2018

This is the second time I've read this book and I think maybe this time I enjoyed it even more. I know when you have a library of 700+ unread books it's silly to go back to something you've already experienced but The Colour Master kind of got me writing again and so it seemed only natural to turn ......more

Goodreads review by Sheree on January 01, 2023

It’s a punchy short story collection that I read in a single night, though it stayed with me for much, much longer than that. Some of the stories give strong Ottessa Moshfegh vibes, others are closer to Carmen Maria Machado - two authors I love, so it’s no surprise it drew me in. If you like your st......more

Goodreads review by Edan on September 05, 2007

I didn't even mean to start reading this collection. I'd been taking my time between books by reading various lit mags, and was so taken by Bender's story in an old issue of Tin House that I picked up her book. It had been on my shelf for over a year, and suddenly I was reading story after story--4......more

Goodreads review by Ksenia on June 03, 2017

From pumpkin-heads to men-pets to a key-fingered boy, from potato-children to an evil mango craving to doctors giving wrong death dates to their patients, this little collection of surreal, metaphorical stories will have you scream in horror for more. I swallowed it, wishing it never stopped. But th......more

Quotes

"[Bender] is Hemingway on an acid trip; her choices are twisted, both ethereal and surprisingly weighty. . . . Terrifyingly lovely." –Los Angeles Times “New, exciting, harsh, rugged and unyielding. . . . Every sentence in [Willful Creatures] is a fresh surprise.” –The Washington Post"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 “These are stories that you'll read with a sense of discovery and wonder. You'll re-read them just for their beauty.” –The Denver Post "To curl up with an Aimee Bender story is to thank heaven you ever learned to read in the first place. . . . What a treat to spend 15 stories in Bender's vast and wonderfully unhinged imagination.” –Entertainment Weekly “I am a long-standing, passionate fan of Aimee Bender’s stories. Her images explode, her words ignite. Watching her imagination catch fire remains a sustaining joy in my readerly life.”—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

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