Willful Creatures

by Aimee Bender

"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
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.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Adult

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2005

About the author

Aimee Bender is the author of the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologized and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

In an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez I read way back in the late eighties, I remember the author saying that this one sentence started him on the road to literature. Until then, he had not known "people were allowed to write like this"!

This is what sets literature apart from all other arts - infinite freedom. The medium lets one create what one wants. Because the written narrative is a meeting of minds - the mind of the writer and that of the reader - imagination is the stage where they come together. They may watch two entirely different shows, and enjoy it all the same. The very abstractness of language proves its greatest strength.

Aimee Bender, in this collection of weird short stories, takes off from where Kafka stopped. Where in Kafka's stories strange things happen in a normal world, here the strangeness is taken for granted. Kafka's abnormal is the new normal.

A boy born to pumpkin-headed parents, with an electric iron for a head (Ironhead).

A universe in which little men are captured and kept as pets by big men (End of the Line).

A man with a set of keys for fingers (The Leading Man).

Potatoes who attain sentience (Dearth).

These are some of the inhabitants of Aimee's literary universe.

The prose is economical to the level of terseness. There is no emotion: the narrative is akin to the way fairy tales are told. Some examples are given below:

Ten men go to ten doctors. All the doctors tell all the men that they only have two weeks left to live. Five men cry. Three men rage. One man smiles. The last man is silent, meditative. Okay, he says. He has no reaction. The raging men, upon meeting in the lobby, don’t know what to do with the man of no reaction. They fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands.

The doctor comes out of his office and apologizes, to the dead man.

("Deathwatch")

The man went to the pet store to buy himself a little man to keep him company. The pet store was full of dogs with splotches and shy cats coy and the friendly people got dogs and the independent people got cats and this man looked around until in the back he found a cage inside of which was a miniature sofa and tiny TV and one small attractive brown-haired man, wearing a tweed suit. He looked at the price tag. The little man was expensive but the big man had a reliable job and thought this a worthy purchase.

("End of the Line")

Two of us hold Debbie down against the passenger door. Two others grab her feet so she can’t run or kick. The one with rings strikes Debbie several times-a few times hard in the stomach and one fist in the face so it will show, tomorrow. So she will have to explain. Debbie is screaming and crying.

We rip the skirt off with our bare hands and her underwear is almost too much to bear, with that
pattern that is the knockoff of the expensive one, and a giant maxi pad weighing down the middle. We rip the skirt into pieces, which is what all the mothers have wanted to do, because it is rags anyway, it is a rag skirt, made of rags. The one with the rings slides her hands down Debbie’s arms and the rings she bought at the street fair cut lines into Debbie’s skin, where drizzles of blood rise freely to the surface.

("Debbieland")

The boy was born with fingers shaped like keys. All except one, the pinkie on the right hand, had sharp ridges running along the inner length, and a point at the tip. They were made of flesh, with nerves and pores, but of a tougher texture, more hardened and specific. As a child, the boy had a difficult time learning to hold a pen and use scissors, but he was resilient and figured out his own method fast enough. His true task was to find the nine doors.

("The Leading Man")

By creating strange, unfamiliar worlds and divorcing emotion from the tale, the author succeeds in forcing the reader to look at the big picture. The structure of power within human communities ("End of the Line"), bullying ("Debbieland"), the outcast changeling ("Ironhead"), the stifling nature of religion ("Job's Jobs")... this method is Brechtian in its conception and execution, and works very well, as these stories are extremely short. I do not know whether they will hold up in a longer version such as a novel.

"End of the Line", "Fruit and Words" and "Ironhead" turned out to be my personal favourites in this collection, but I loved all these weird vignettes. If you are a connoisseur of the strange, you will too.

[Laura Leaney · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 as you sit through a meeting. Wondering if it will happen again. It does. Only the next morning you are fished out by a spoon. Weird.

My favorite stories here are "The End of the Line," "Motherfucker," and "Dearth." The language is beautiful and every story contains elements of the unaccountable. Children born with heads like pumpkins, like irons, potatoes that magically reappear day after day, little people who are caught and kept as pets. One begins to expect the unexpected. Perhaps that's life lesson number one.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read 14/5/19 4.5 stars

Still a favourite short story collection of mine but there might be one or two stories that weren’t as good as the others. My favourites are definitely Off, The Meeting, Ironhead, Fruit and Nuts and The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers.

If you’re feeling in an experimental mood and want to try some surrealist fiction, please check out this collection.
————————————
Stop what you're reading and pick up this treasure of a book NOW!

Willful Creatures was given to me as a gift and the person who gave it to me told me that this book changed their notion of what a short story could be. I have to say, after reading this book, I completely and utterly agree with them.

I have never read any of Aimee Bender's work before and I was completely enchanted by what she had to offer in this collection of short stories. She beautifully captures humanity; all its highs and lows, its strengths, weaknesses, struggles and joys. She writes stories with her heart, pouring all her emotions and energies into her craft with some truly astounding results.

I can honestly say that there isn't a weak story in this collection and that in itself is a virtually impossible achievement. Yet Bender manages to pull it off.

Her writing has a musicality to it, a tenderness and subtle brutality which reinforces her storytelling genius. She reminds me of a female Raymond Carver but with a dash of surrealism added into the mix.

Quite simply, I think Aimee Bender's work is nothing short of perfection. Language comes easily to her. Her use of similies, metaphors and imagery blows me away! She instills the same magical feelings inside me, the way Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine did - whisking me away from the mundane and into the fantastical.

I'll share a few of my favourite descriptions:

"It was that fifteen-year-old laugh that is like a stream of bubbles but makes everyone else feel stupid and left out."

"It was like the whole afternoon had got a haircut that was too short."

"Their sex is like castles; it has moats and turrets."

"...breathing out clouds into the cramped sky of his bedroom."

"Those broad shoulders he could spot across an ocean."

Willful Creatures is an inspiring read for readers and writers alike. Readers will love the collection for its myriad subject matters and writers will love it because it will change and shape your perception of the short story; there are no restrictions on what a short story can be. Bender's prose conjures up a fantastical array of images and leaves you moved beyond words.

If you want a book that might just change your life, then look no further because Willful Creatures ticks that box.

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

He stood with the starlet for a while and told her he was a graduate student at the school for emotional ventriloquists. She raised one carefully shaped eyebrow. "No," he said, "it's true." She laughed. "No," he said, "it's true. You throw your emotions on other people in the room," he explained, "and see what they do then."

"So what do they do?" she asked, keeping that perfect eyebrow halfway up her forehead.

"It depends," he sighed. "Sometimes they lob them right back at you."

Once again, Aimee Bender wows me with a collection of not-entirely-rooted-in-reality stories.

Men and women, victims and bullies are all fodder for Bender's pen. As in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, my favorites were the most far-fetched - a boy with fingers shaped like keys, a pumpkin-headed woman who gives birth to a baby with an iron for a head, some potatoes haunt a woman until she adopts them.

In Job's Jobs, an angry, weapon-clutching God appears every time a man takes an interest in a new hobby. God threatens him with a knife when he takes up painting, a bayonet when he tries acting. A noose for the culinary arts. How about the piano?

Don't even think about it, barked God.

Dance? Rifle.

Architecture? Grenade.

Phew! What ever you do, don't piss that Guy off!

By now you've probably guessed I'm completely in love with Bender's short stories. I've got two of her novels to read yet, but I'm betting she'll be making the jump onto the favorite authors list before long.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure I can star-rate books of short fiction. Some of these stories (e.g., "Off") I loved so much that I nearly cried when I read them, while others (e.g., "Fruit and Words") I hated to the point of becoming physically ill. In her dart-throwing at axes mapping "Whimsical Quirk" and "Nihilistic Depravity," Bender does on occasion hit some sublime points. I'd read "Off" in an anthology, and it was like doing some weird new exercise that doesn't feel all that special at the time, but the next day you wake up sore and can't walk right for a week. Some of her stories are very, very good. My problem was that when craaaazy stories like this (many about children made partly or wholly of inanimate objects) don't quite come off, the results feel excruciating, like watching some pathetic exercise in imaginative contortion: "Look Ma, I'm Creative!" Bear in mind though, I have a severe allergic reaction to whimsy. Also, don't get me wrong: these stories are incredibly dark and disturbing. And, for the most part, they were pretty good. I'm not sure I should keep reading whole books of one author's short stories in a block like this. I think it makes me get really tired of the person's shtick, even when I basically do like what they're doing.

[Nadine Rose Larter · Rating 5 out of 5]

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  back and  revisit the other quirks of Aimee Bender. The richness of the bizarre in these books just soothes my soul. I feel massively influenced by Aimee's writing, which I suppose is weird. If you read my stuff it's probably nothing like her writing except for the occasional elements of magical realism. But she is divine. Otherwordly even. And she has certainly done an incredible job of sparking off my creativity for the year.

[Sheree | Keeping Up With The Penguins · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 stories weird and dripping with pathos, give this one a go.

My full review of Willful Creatures appeared first on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

[Edan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 or so at a time. They are all swift reads, the prose simple and lovely, all of them strange: a boy has keys for hands, a woman raises potatoes as her children, a motherfucker (literally, he fucks mothers) falls in love with a starlet. Some of the stories are a bit thin, and a little too arbitrarily kooky for my taste (too "hey I had this crazy dream, so now I'm writing a story as if it really happened!"), but overall this was a pleasing, often dazzling, read. I'd pick Aimee Bender to win in a wrestling match with Miranda July, any day.

Oh, and: Last summer I was having a really bad writing day so I went to LACMA to distract myself from my lack of talent and motivation. I was at the lowest depths of self-misery when I realized Aimee Bender was standing right next to me! Of course I didn't say anything, but I was thinking: "You and me, Aimee, you and me." I felt much better after that.


Oh, and: The story I found in Tin House is still my favorite in the collection. It's called "The End of the Line," about a man who buys a tiny man as a pet, only to torture him. I will leave it at that, but I related the entire story to Patrick after reading it breathlessly, my hand over my heart, and the tears in my eyes as I described the story to him made him fall in love with me all over again. (Or so I assume).

[Ksenia Anske · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 then it did. Damn. If you love my dark writing, you will love this with a lusty, death-craving love. Yes, there is such a thing in literature. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

many, apparently coffee induced claps



A solid contribution to an otherwise brilliant and unparallelled collection of writing. I can't in any simple words express how much I enjoy this author. These short stories may not hold up against the glory of her previous work, but they come pretty darn close.



Each is a combination of dark, but also has elements of hope, self discovery, and a lot of potential for our main characters. These characters evolve, recognizing their own flaws, and accomplish some level of person enlightenment.



Take for instance the incredibly story titled End of the Line. The creep factor is at once cringe worthy but also shockingly beautiful—maybe I'm just a tad sick and twisted myself.

A man (a very big man) buys a little man at a pet store. He cages him, tortures him, and breaks this little man. This little man, who was once hopeful and positive is slowly reduced to a fraction of his former self. It is dark, unsettling, and, as with all her shorts, very meaningful. I suppose that is the magic of her writing; she is at once abstract, but also personally connects to the reader. Your understanding of these shorts is very intimate.



The common thread throughout this is violence, and to a large extent power over another form. In another short story A woman cravings for a mango become inseparable for her other thoughts. She is no longer able to think of anything else, not even the simple act of driving her car. She finds, out of pure luck a simple woman selling amazingly delicious mangoes. Oh but be careful what you wish for, because our lead character finds herself in the grasp of a woman who was perceived as simple, but has the ability to collect and cage the essence of our existence. She is able, for instance to encase various objects, such as behaviors, fruits, and body parts in shapes. You can buy these for a hefty fee, and one is confronted with a logic question; is she is able to do this, does the actual object exist from our world? Is buying them back the only way to bring them forward into a world that once lost this object. Is ones ability to train and contain an object like nut expressing a deeper meaning of her ability to control these for her own pleasure? Subjective, personal... creepy.... eery darkness that strikes at your inner cords and elicits fear and makes you feel quite unsettled.

in an even more unsettling story we find our main character, a woman, who realizes that her potato is growing slowly into a child. She can't avoid this transition as the potato takes on a significant change from root vegetable to child.


Sometimes you will find that surrealism is a style that either loses the writer or the reader and trails off, losing its significance. NOT here friends. She is skilled in this form and the gentle currents that shift from the normal to the unbelievable seem ever convincing and fit perfectly amount the pages of this lovely collection. You really don't even have to question your own reality, or displace your conscious and unconscious orientation to the walls that surround you, and the world outside them. She does this so well, this style of writing, that you feel at once involved in the storyline, but just outside of it so that you too can collect meaning from it, and if you dare, if you are brave and willing to, embed it into your own personal meaning of you and the world.


as usual a bit of a draft

[Sheida · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of really unique stories told by an extremely magical writing style. I'm excited to read more by this author.

[Krok Zero · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really want to like Aimee Bender...but based on this collection I think she's overhyped. For one thing, all the press about Bender as a fantasist or magical-realism practitioner is GROSSLY overstated. Most of the stories in here are straight-up realistic, and only a few are outright fantastical. Not that there's anything wrong with that—I'm just saying there's some false advertising going on.

The stories are all slightly on the quirky side but most of them are so wispy and minor-key that they don't really offer any compelling reason to exist or leave a lasting impression. That kind of fiction writing just isn't my cup of tea. Bender has a way of writing about love and relationships that's deadly earnest without being very perceptive; her characters are divorced from reality, not in an interesting fantasy way but an annoying I'm-so-clever way. Except she's not even all that clever.

[Jason]

Wow brb going to the store to buy a coffee mug that says #1 Amy Bender fan. This is the weirdest and best shit I’ve ever read in my life. There’s a story in here about raising potatoes as children and i somehow related to it a lot. If you like surrealism and having tons of fun while reading (with the occasional emotional gut punch) read this now.

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining and unusual. I found it a bit up and down in quality.

[Nik Perring · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Don't Do Reviews.

It's true. I don't. But I do like to mention books I've enjoyed, and I've not enjoyed anything more than Willful Creatures, by Aimee Bender in a long time.


So where to start? Well, the book's a collection of short stories, fifteen in all. And they're fantastic and I mean, REALLY fantastic. I ordered the book from my library after reading a review of it in The Short Review. The first story grabbed my attention, it was like being grabbed by the throat, to tell the truth. And after reading it I thought, wow, this is good, I hope she can keep it up.


And she does. And I mean REALLY. Each story seemed better than the last, which when I considered each one a gem, is quite a thing.




Three stories in I ordered my own copy. Now, this wasn't solely so I could have my own copy, though that was a big part of things. You see, I wanted to read the book slowly. Slowly. I wanted to savour the experience. Take one story at a time. One every few days, giving myself a real treat. And I didn't want a library fine.


After each story I think I spent longer sitting, turning the book in my hands, being in that strange, warm, glowing place of reflective admiration, than I did reading the stories themselves.


And on to the stories themselves. If I were to describe them they'd sound odd and strange and trippy. And they are a bit: there's a women who has potatoes for babies; a family of pumpkin-headed people who have an iron-headed son; a man with a noisy brain...

But as bizarre as they sound, they (and the less out-there sounding ones) have one common factor: they all have an affecting emotional heaviness. And they all feel very, very real. (Okay, I know that's two - so what!) They're all boldly, and excellently, dazzlingly written (there's a touch of Hemingway's directness) and utterly captivating. And they all have resonance. I think they're all applicable to our lives, to our world. It genuinely felt as though it could have been written for me.


When I finished it last week I was genuinely disappointed. That was it. All gone. No more.


It'll be a long time before I read something as good, I think. It's not all bad though - there are two other Aimee Bender books out there for me to read...


- from http://nikperring.blogspot.com

[Hilary "Fox" · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sasha leant me this book with a cursory order to read it when I had the time. It took me quite a while to get to it, but I did, and I'm quite glad of that, too. I've not read a collection of short stories in a while, and when it comes to short stories, I can be rather particular. I grew up on a fair bit of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson with some Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King mixed in.

Well. Aimee Bender did not disappoint.

This isn't to say that her writing is automatically of a similar tier to the others, as it isn't. Her endings can be a bit sloppy, or her dialogue a bit too fantastic to deal with. That having been said, she still packs a mean punch that is maybe just one step below Kelly Link. I thought a lot about Link reading this, actually. While nothing in this book reaches the level of the short story "Magic for Beginners" there are still a number of stories in here that I think will stick with me. "Fruit and Words" for instance, I found incredibly compelling. The story of the potato children was likewise fantastic, as was the story of the miniature man. While some ended too quickly, others dragged on a bit long. "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers" could have used a bit better editing, but was still a solid piece.

All in all I think the book could have been edited better, but even without the additional editing it was good enough that I devoured it, loved it, and heartily recommend it. I'd read more of her books quite eagerly, and am quite curious to see where she ends up.

[Lukáš Cabala · Rating 4 out of 5]

veľmi originálne poviedky. Mne sa páčila najme Nouze - o zemiakoch... Ale celkovo je to naozaj čítavá zbierka s pekným jazykom a nevšednými zápletkami.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much as it usually is with me, this collection was a mixed bag tending more towards the negative than otherwise. Some, however, are quite heartfelt, both happily and not: "End of the Line", "Dearth", and "The Leading Man" are the best of the bunch, with "Hymn"and "Motherfucker" (yes, that's the actual title) in second tier, the rest being a bit too stolid and/or melodramatic in the suburban nuclear WASP family or Gaiman sense to appeal much. At its best, it reminded me of the sense of emotive wonder I used to chase in my pre-GR days, especially that which strummed the chord of compassion in the midst of unease or terror. The glimpses of what I hope Bender was truly trying for wasn't enough for me to think of seeking out any more of her writing, but it's good to know that I'm not completely desensitized to whatever "hip" writing the 21st century has to offer. Still, it's not my favorite century, and much of what is fueling my current streak of modern reading is the thought that, once this month is through, I can run full throttle into the 19th and the 15th and beyond. Until then, I chip away: sometimes enthusiastically, more often not.

It took nine years for me to acquire a copy of this, so as per usual, a lot has changed in regards to my taste between then and now. I'd like to think that I at least am in possession of a more full bodied set of evaluation criteria these days than I was nearly a decade ago, so it's no use worrying that I may have liked this more had I shelled $13.00 plus tax straight out instead of a buck many years later. Then again, the themes most of these works tough on are extremely mature, and I may have had a hard time understanding the mix of tenderness in violence in many of them had I not previously lived through similarly charged experiences, albeit on a more mundane plain with nary a pumpkin head or potato child to be found. That's the issue with works like this, I suppose: how to strike that fine balance between fantastical venues and adult themes without over-sentimentalizing and/or brutalizing in either direction. Carter's The Bloody Chamber does it, and after reading many similarly themed works subsequent to that one and finding the vast majority lacking (including some of Carter's own works), I worry that reading that magnificent collection so early on irreversibly set in myself high standards that I'll forever be seeking to match. That doesn't mean I won't keep trying, though: there are too many still vastly under-read/underappreciated authors who actually make full use of the potential of fantasy out there for me to give up on the genre yet.

It's going to be hard, but I'm going to wait and finish my current stack of books before committing to anything else, just so I can more accurately gauge the amount of pages I can cram into the last few days of 2019. This year has been deceptively repetitive, and often days and weeks and almost the entirety of certain months blurred together through sheer business than anything else, so I was often extremely bored but too exhausted to even think of doing anything else. Finishing this off removes yet another hang around from my shelf, and I can only hope that 2020 brings in as much variety in my day to day occupation as I usually manage to guarantee in my reading. I don't see myself regaining the obsession I once had with this sort of contemporary, 'quirky' fantastical style, but it was good to be reminded of a time of my life whose reading triumphs gave me the confidence to do the kind of bungee jumping that I have planned for next year's reading challenges. Short stories still aren't my thing, but maybe in a few decades or so, I'll skim back, check out the ones that I mentioned by title, and do some weird compilation review. It'll be more for analyzing my own ego/super/id purposes than anything else, and if Bender comes out of it nicely, I may revisit her yet.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am on a short story streak. Three in a row. This book published in 2005 was “Discarded from Pima County Library System” for some reason in 2006. I wonder why?

Ten men go to ten doctors. All the doctors tell all the men that they only have two weeks left to live. Five men cry. Three men rage. One man smiles. The last man is silent, meditative. Okay, he says. He has no reaction. The raging men, upon meeting in the lobby, don’t know what to do with the man of no reaction. They fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands. The doctor comes out of his office and apologizes, to the dead man.
Dang it, he says sheepishly, to his colleagues. Looks like I got the date wrong again.
One can’t account for murder or accidents, says another doctor in his bright white coat.

Sometimes you have a chance to see what is coming and you go on anyway. Aimee Bender was like that for me. An entire book of her short stories might be a little much for some of us. But I only have one book of hers so I read it all and do not feel motivated to seek out another right away.

Ready for more?

About half the people here are in couples. I stand alone because I plan on making all these women jealous, reminding them how incredible it is to be single instead of always being with the same old same old except tonight I am jealous too because all their men are seeming particularly tall and kind on this foggy wintery night and one is wearing a shirt a boyfriend of mine used to own with that nubby terry-cloth material recycled from soda cans and it smells clean from where I’m standing, ten feet away, and it’s not a good sign when something like a particular laundry detergent can just like that undo you.

You noticed the run-on sentence? By the end of the book, you will get used to it probably. This is just the right size to be a bathroom book, but most of the stories are too long. But, heck, you mostly don’t have to read the whole story to get the idea!

I have been quoting GR reviews the past couple of books and I decided that I would not do that for this one – though I am sorely tempted – but, just one would be OK, right?

This book made me SO UNCOMFORTABLE. All prickly and twitchy and fidgety like I was watching the stupid movie about your period in 6th grade.

I couldn’t help myself. And neither can Aimee! Four stars leaning toward five. But just for one book!

P.S. Ultimately, I didn’t understand this book. And that is how I think it should be. If I did understand it, it might be five stars.

[Viera Némethová · Rating 5 out of 5]

Súbor výborne napísaných, originálnych poviedok s fantastknými prvkami a veľkým zmyslom pre detail a bez jedinej zbytočnej vety. Knihu preložili študenti filozofickej fakulty a budúci prekladatelia. Autorkin obdivuhodný štýl vás bude fascinovať od prvej po poslednú poviedku. Hrdinami príbehov sú tvrdohlavé stvorenia- drobný mužíček, dieťa so žehličkohlavou, zemiakové deti, ľudia osamelí, opustení, hľadajúci... Hrdinom predposlednej poviedky je muž s kľúčmi miesto prstov. Ak si nájdete svoj vlastný kľúč či kľúče od týchto príbehov, dosadíte si do postáv, dejov a symbolov vlastné premenné budú pre vás podnetom na zamyslenie sa, podobne ako to bolo u mňa.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Willful Creatures Stories by Aimee Bender
New York: Doubleday & Company
$22.95 – 208 pages

The man went to the pet store to buy himself a little man to keep him company. The pet store was full of dogs with splotches and shy cats coy and the friendly people got dogs and the independent people got cats and this man looked around until in the back he found a cage inside of which was a miniature sofa and tiny TV and one small attractive brown-haired man wearing a tweed suit. He looked at the price tag. The little man was expensive but the big man had a reliable job and thought this a worthy purchase.
“End of the Line,” p. 14

Recently, Garrison Keilor mentioned a new writer, Aimee Bender on his daily post, “The Writer’s Almanac.” Garrison noted that Bender’s quirky and enigmatic books were causing quite a stir on the west coast – short stories about families with pumpkin heads and little boys who are born with fingers shaped like keys. An Internet search informed me that Aimee’s books contained strange parables that often left the reader both puzzled and fascinated. I immediately ordered The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own and Willful Creatures Stories.

An Invisible Sign of My Own opens with this paragraph:

“There was this kingdom once where everyone
lived forever. They discovered the secret of
eternal life, and because of that, there were no
cemeteries, no hospitals, no funeral parlors, no
books in the bookstore about death and grieving.
Instead, the bookstore was full of pamphlets
About how to be a righteous citizen without fear of an afterlife.”

I was hooked. For the past two weeks, I have been reading odd fables that often resemble perverse variations of Grimm fairy tales.

In “Off” from Willful Creatures Stores, a determined young woman goes to a party intending to kiss three men: A black-haired one, a red-head and a blond. Her plan has disastrous consequences. Then, there is “Debbieland” where a shy teenager is attacked and humiliated because she wears a skirt that offends some fellow students. In “Fruit Without Words,” a customer at a roadside fruit stand discovers that it is possible to buy words that are composed of the items that they represent.

“Ironhead” is a disturbing tale of a child born with the head of an iron frying pan – born into a family of pumpkin-heads. In “Dearth,” a lonely woman finds seven potatoes in her kitchen; despite all of her efforts to rid herself of them, they return and gradually develop arms, legs and facial features. Willful Creatures also contains “The Leading Man” and the story about the boy with fingers that resemble keys – keys that are destined to open locks that appear throughout the boy’s life.

What is going on here? At present, a great many people are attempting to analyze these stories. I am struck by how many of Bender’s perverse tales appear to be parables that embody the problems that beset all of us. Bender’s protagonists are often victims of alienation and rejection. They are filled with yearnings and a desperate need to “belong” and often, they overcome daunting obstacles only to be disillusioned with their success.

My favorite in the Willful Creatures Stories collection, “Job’s Jobs,” is a marvelous variation of the travails of the biblical Job. Bender’s modern-day Job is pursued by a vengeful and unrelenting God. Each time that Job acquires success (a writer, a painter, an actor, etc.) God appears and demands that Job relinquish his new career. In addition, God refuses to justify his actions. Finally, Jobs world becomes so small, he is left no alternative but to retreat to the infinite world of his inner thoughts.

Although I found some of Bender’s stories inexplicable, I am so pleased with the ones that provide a shrewd insight
into life’s uncertainties, problems and mysteries (death, alienation, guilt, etc.) I wholeheartedly recommend these books. If you like Angela Carter, Ambrose Bierce and the poetry of Stephen Crane, you will treasure Aimee Bender

[Nathanial · Rating 3 out of 5]

"What's interesting in a story isn't the situation," said Amy Hempel, quoting her instructor at Columbia, Gordon Lish, "it's the people in it and how they respond to it."

So with Bender. Of course the cover has a picture of a little man in a cage - that's what happens when the little men hunters capture a little man and sell him to a big man. Big whup. The story comes in when we see how the big man deals with his new power, and how the little people have prepared for such abuses.

Bender writes in the proud, quirky tradition of Hempel herself, drawing on Carter's ascerbic brevity and Calvino's bucolic wit. What comes across isn't just the offhand surrealism of a Kafka or succinct contemplations of a Primo Levi, but the willingness to discard such devices. As soon as you might think, oh, I've got her figured out, the next character's going to have a kettle for a head, she gives you a perfectly normal character - and then completely destroys what it means to be normal. And, of course, it's the next story that has the kettle-headed protagonist.

This book bounds and leaps from the frenzied anxiety of her first collection, Girl In the Flammable Skirt. She wrote a novel in the meantime, An Invisible Sign of My Own, which may have given her the space to play with scope and pace in a way that she had initially wanted to do in the shorter forms. Whatever it is (and it probably wasn't the studies at Irvine or the workshops in Iowa), her talent has honed; with it, she provides the roominess within one story that lets five pages carry more than many novelists do in two hundred.

[Kellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first 5 star rating of 2015 and I'm not going to write a review on it. I don't even know how. Something about this book, these stories, kind of got to me. They just made sense to me in ways I can't explain. I don't know what I expected from this book but it sure wasn't any of this:

It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened; before you find yourself, at the base of her spine, different.

Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, slats or pinpricks, it can't fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can't heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.

She stared at the wall as the craving built bricks inside her stomach, and then she burst onto him like a brief rain in drought season.

My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, Aimee Bender you have wooed me with your wily words. I savored the little delectables like, “Goodbye’ we said to each other, and the kiss was an old dead sock.” And “It was like the whole afternoon had got a haircut that was too short.” She peppered such strange juxtapositions throughout all the stories which were themselves like reading Dali painting—close to reality but wonderfully distorted. There seemed to be a lot of kissing in her stories, magical realism and then a few plain stories, like my almost favorite I Will Pick Out Your Ribs (from my Teeth) because it seemed so very coherent and perfectly proportioned.

These stories are not for everybody—they’re for the people who grew up on Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. The stories are strange and sometimes heartless, but always interesting!

[Darnia · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a bizzare yet beautiful short stories. Every story felt so magical. My favorite is the Ironhead about a boy with head as an iron, who born in the middle of pumpkinheads family. Also Dearth, the story about a woman who has potatoes as her babies. It was hard for me to find the true meanings for some stories which too surealist, but since it wrote so beautiful, I have nothing to complaint.

[Jan Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first book of hers, I chose it at the library partially because of the name and cover. After the first story I wasn't sure what to make of it. But after two or three I realized I loved this collection! I would highly recommend it. And I enjoyed taking my time between stories and letting them sink in a little. Odd enchanting stories of willfulness and resistance to sorrow and circumstance. " My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside."

[Nick Otte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes you meet a work of art that makes your bones sing with recognition and hope. In Willful Creatures I met several. Already I’ve been retelling these stories to myself silently by memory, and I’m so grateful for their company.

This is the most enlivening reading short stories has been for me in years.

Favorite stories:

Ironhead
leading Man
Dearth
The Meeting

[Tifanee Mask Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absurdity. This is a book you read after a glass of wine… or two… or three. Read it aloud and read it to someone you like to kiss
This book is practically twenty at the time of my reading. I selected it in a desperate stupor to consume more short story anthologies… longing to find some kind of answers to life’s most pressing questions within a short story like I did as a depressed college student in a comp class after reading “Parker’s Back”. Truly, most of the stories in this particular book are pleasantly nonsensical but there are several that must have some meaning in some way, though it couldn’t be the same for all of us as readers.
It’s jarring and yet familiar, pensive yet irrational. The steady stream of serendipity was enough to keep me flipping pages until the book was complete in a sitting.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird stuff... fortunately, I like weird stuff. I don't know that I would recommend this collection of short stories to anyone I know, but out there somewhere is someone with a twisted outlook on the world, who appreciates dark humor and allegorical glances into the grey areas of human nature; and that person is the one who can appreciate these surreal portraits. Bender's brand of magical realism is really pushed to the boundaries - bordering on fantasy much more so than on reality... making some of the stories entertaining and others almost repulsive, which I think was very much her intent. Deceptively light in construction, these stories are easy to eat but not easy to digest... the more one turns the stories over in thought the more you discover Bender's cleverness and cruelty; however, the cruelty she portrays is ours, not hers - the cleverness is all her - and you begin to understand that the "willful creatures" to which she refers in the title are you and me.

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Again, a book I didn't actually finish. It seems like the author has a fetish with sex. This book is full of short stories. I was reading it for a book club, but decided not to finish it. Every short story had sex in it somewhere. I don't realy think I'm a prude, but come on, every story...even when they're short stories and when sex isn't an integral part of the story (and should it ever be?). The only one of the short stories I could kind of understand (since these are all filled with symbolism) was Jinx. I could relate to how quickly a friendship could fall apart, especially in junior high or high school. Seems like often times it's one small thing that happens and a friendship is ruined. I didn't like this book. I didn't understand much of her symbolism. I think I'm a straight-forward reader/writer.