reading notes

by Aimee Bender
ISBN: 0385492162

I love weird stories. When I read Willful Creatures back in January, I knew I’d need to track down the rest of Bender’s work.

This story collection came first. There are plastic lips and buried sweaters, a lover’s de-evolution, an imp and a mermaid, thieves and magic (or is it cursed?) rings. The sort of stuff you quickly get the feeling is usual for Aimee Bender. I like them for not seeming impossible, for still managing to be about feelings and the human condition. It can be quite hard to recognize the human condition from the inside at times, and her twisted stories make absolute sense if you keep this in mind.

Recommended. If you are new to Bender you can start here and know you have another wonderfully freakish collection, alive with language, oddity throbbing through it, to look forward to.

by Karen Russell
ISBN: 9780307276674

This is a book of deep and intricately twisted stories, the kind that made me squirm the way only childhood injustices or impending adolescent disaster can.

Russell is great with titles, too with “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers”, “The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime”, and “Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows” all offer.

Does it make sense to say Russell packs a novel into a short story? That isn’t exactly what I mean, but it’s close. They were on the longer side of what I have been reading for stories lately at 20-30 pages apiece, but they didn’t seem like long stories. Russell constructs a whole world in this book, and many of the stories you can place on the same map of imaginary geography. She has a whole novel’s worth of knowledge about it in her head (and them some, probably) and shows us tantalizing glimpses, enough to get a feel for the place and wonder about it and want to see more of her world.

So while there are some quirky connections among the stories — a character, the Bowl-a-Bed hotel — the real connection I made as a reader was to the bewilderment of the characters, story after story, trapped by forces they can’t control, and don’t really understand. Russell captures well the crazy energy of possibility and fear that comes in childhood. Highly recommended.