The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Ratings6
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings6
Average rating3.5
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.
*From the publisher ([via][1])*
[1]: http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-0385492162-5
Reviews with the most likes.
Bender write a very interesting story, but she gets on my nerves with her inability to actually end each story with a conclusion. Every single one in here doesn't end in a satisfactory way. If she didn't write so beautifully, I wouldn't recommend this.
Do you ever add books to your wishlist and forget who recommended a book and how you first heard about it and why you wanted to read it? I wish I knew who recommended this book to me....In a sentence, it is one odd book. In this book of short stories, you never know what is going to happen. You might go to school with an imp or an ice girl. Your father might develop a hole through his stomach the size of a soccer ball. You might fall in love with a robber who takes you along on his jobs. The stories don't have a Twilight Zone feel to them; instead, you feel like you are in the real world you've always been in, but you are looking at things very, very carefully, like they really are.
If you add this book to your wishlist after reading this review, and you wait and wait and wait to get a copy of the book, and then the book sits and sits and sits on the shelf, and then, when you finally read it, months from now, and you wonder what you were thinking when you got it...don't blame me...you've been warned.
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