Alla vigilia del suo nono compleanno, la timida Rose Edelstein scopre improvvisamente di avere uno strano dono: ogni volta che mangia qualcosa, il sapore che sente è quello delle emozioni provate da chi l'ha preparato, mentre lo preparava. I dolci della pasticceria dietro casa hanno un retrogusto di rabbia, il cibo della mensa scolastica sa di noia e frustrazione; ma il peggio è che le torte preparate da sua madre, una donna allegra ed energica, acquistano prima un terrificante sapore di a...

Aimee Bender’s stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt*,* proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise.Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the par...

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerf...

"A collection of wistful, witty stories." --Esquire"Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty." --Harper's BazaarA 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 wh...

"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 ReviewAimee 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 h...

The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the worldOn the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with he...

Con la sua originale miscela di surrealismo, prosa musicale e potenza emotiva, Aimee Bender è diventata una delle scrittrici di culto della nuova scena letteraria americana. I quindici racconti di questa raccolta sono incroci originalissimi tra la realtà e la fiaba: vi compaiono omini in miniatura tenuti in gabbia come animali da compagnia, piccole patate ambulanti, coppie con la testa a forma di zucca e sculture fatte d'aria e d'acqua in vendita nel bel mezzo del deserto del Nevada; ma an...

La scrittura di Aimee Bender è da sempre un inconfondibile mix di realismo e fantasia; in questa nuova raccolta di racconti la sua voce, carica di sensualità e magia, continua a ridisegnare il mondo in maniera originale, senza concessioni al sentimentalismo e ai cliché della narrativa «femminile». Alcune storie sono ambientate al giorno d'oggi, fra teenager al centro commerciale o studentesse in un campus universitario; in altre fa capolino l'elemento surreale (un ragazzino che soffre di «...

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE - A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICKLONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD**'The Butterfly Lampshade is an unflinching, empathetic portrayal of a childhood touched by mental illness. As always, Aimee Bender's respect for the child and the child withi...

La raccolta di racconti che ha segnato l'esordio di Aimee Bender contiene già il tratto caratteristico dei bestseller che la consacreranno come una delle più innovative e brillanti scrittrici contemporanee, L'inconfondibile tristezza della torta al limone e Un segno invisibile e mio: la dimensione surreale, fiabesca e a tratti disturbante in cui innesta le esperienze umane più comuni e condivise: l'amore, il tradimento, il desiderio, le dinamiche familiari, l'amicizia. Dietro l'uomo che to...

The bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a wondrous collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories.Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange” (People), “richly imagined and bittersweet” (Vanity Fair), and “full of provocative ideas” (The Boston Globe). In her deft hand...

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” SelectionThe old man and the old woman always dreamed the same dreams. Everyone in Celia’s town knows the couple, married sixty years, with wrinkled skin down to their wrists—but one summer, while Celia takes care of her father, refusing to join her mother on the next leg of their concentration camp museum tour, the old man and the old woman start prophesying, and the town is forever changed.“Dreaming in Polish” invites the reader to loo...