Name: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Stories
ISBN: 9780385492164

Synopsis

"A collection of wistful, witty stories." --Esquire

"Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty." --Harper's Bazaar

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.

A 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best works of fiction of 1998.

Recommendations

Interpreter of Maladies Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Like Bender, Lahiri builds entire emotional universes in compressed spaces—her stories about disconnection and longing have that same quality of the surreal emerging quietly from the domestic. Both writers excel at finding the grotesque and tender coexisting in ordinary moments, though Lahiri grounds hers in cultural specificity where Bender leans into magical realism.

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Ficciones

by Jorge Luis Borges

This is the surprise pick—Borges writes stories that operate like philosophical puzzles wrapped in narrative, and his prose has that same musical quality Bender achieves, but filtered through a completely different sensibility. If you loved how Bender's stories make you question what's real and what's metaphor, Borges takes that disorientation and makes it the entire point, creating worlds that feel both impossible and inevitable.

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Zadie Smith "White Teeth" and Multiculturalism

by Sylvia Hadjetian

Smith shares Bender's gift for finding dark comedy in human contradiction—her characters are shaped by desires and histories that don't quite fit together, and she writes about them with both affection and unflinching honesty. The prose here is more maximalist than Bender's, but both writers refuse to let their characters off easy, forcing them to live with the consequences of their own strangeness.

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The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

by Angela Carter

Carter's stories twist fairy tales the way Bender twists everyday life—both writers take familiar forms and wrench them sideways to expose something raw underneath. Carter's prose is more baroque and sensual, but she shares Bender's interest in how desire (sexual and otherwise) can remake a person, and her willingness to let stories end in unexpected, unsettling places.

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Securing the Commonwealth Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America

by Jennifer J. Baker

This is a more recent work (2014) that captures something Bender was reaching for—the fragmentary nature of how we actually experience desire, marriage, and identity. Offill writes in sharp, poetic fragments rather than traditional narrative, but like Bender, she's interested in the gap between what we expect from relationships and what we actually get, rendered with both wit and genuine heartbreak.

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