DECEMBER 2013 - AudioFile
Whether they’re telling the story of a man who pretended to be a war criminal (“The Fake Nazi”) or recounting an attempt to determine the color of the moon (“The Color Master”), the narrators of these stories give understated but evocative performances that complement Bender’s unsettling and often funny tales. The collection’s more surreal elements, such as the sewing of tigers’ skin in “Tiger Mending” and the mysteriously appearing knickknacks and food in “Americca,” are balanced by the readers’ well-paced speech and naturalistic delivery. Especially appealing is the performance of “Lemonade,” in which a guileless teenager wonders if she’s “racist by accident” during a trip to the mall. E.M. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
Aimee Bender is at her wickedly best in her latest short-story collection, with tales both dark and comic….Bender’s work has never been the stuff of manic pixie dream-girl lit. Her fairy tales are dark and wicked, not hipster-precious and faux old-timey. Her sorcery altogether avoids the saccharine, and the thrills and chills of this sometimes sexual, often horror-drenched collection are completely adult. At a time when realism reigns supreme over the literary landscape, one can argue it is absolutely imperative that Aimee Bender be spotlighted for what she is: a vital MVP of modern letters, period…In our world of flash-and-trash insta-Internet-oddities and stranger-than-fiction social-media-bloopers, she will have surpassed the simple feat of inventiveness to own a most dazzlingly urgent relevancy.”
—Los Angeles Times
"The Color Master offers 15 new tales that dazzle, confound, electrify, disturb, incriminate and empathize. It is sympathetic toward cake that cannot die and hopeful about the healing arts of darkness. It is absurd. It is remarkable. It induces mental whiplash...And it's so vividly imagined, so unusual, that those of us who read books with the hope of encountering language and ideas we haven't encountered before will feel — well, we'll feel heard."
—Chicago Tribune
"Full of humor, wit, and pathos, The Color Master is the work of a writer with a strong, distinctive point of view, and with enough confidence to let it lead her into fresh and exciting places."
—The Boston Globe
"All these stories made my mouth water."
—Alan Cheuse, NPR's "All Things Considered"
"Bender became a bestselling novelist with The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but her new collection returns readers to her real forte: short stories that combine gnomic postmodern prose with whimsical fairy tale reveries...[T]he best stories are mood pieces about the mysteries of female friendship ('Bad Return') and bittersweet pageants populated by mall-worshipping adolescents ('Lemonade'), still fanciful but so light on gimmick that the reader senses — like the lovelorn atheist in 'The Doctor and the Rabbi' — 'the realization that there were many ways to live a life.' Many ways to write a life too, and Bender colors them with a tincture out of dreams. The world is everywhere present in this collection, but it gets the moon in, too."
—Publishers Weekly
"Stories that range from fairy tales to quasi-erotica, all showing Bender's versatility...Bender's gifts as an author are prodigious, and with each story, she moves the reader in surprising, not to say startling, ways."
—Kirkus Reviews
"In the lively pages of Aimee Bender's dazzlingly dreamlike new story collection, The Color Master, Asian tigers split their skins and are mended by specially trained seamstresses; a woman who is 'ugly, by human standards,' falls in love with a man-eating giant she meets in a tavern; and random gifts, including cans of lobster bisque, materialize out of thin air, perhaps delivered by ghosts. These fantastical elements season the soup of Bender's savory and sublime human sagas...So many of Bender's sentences both settle and unsettle, and deserve to be read aloud for pure pleasure."
—-Oprah.com
"In Aimee Bender's short stories, the value of life is measured in terms of goodness, succulence and simplicity, all qualities that can be tasted, chewed and ultimately swallowed by the mouth or the mind."
—The New York Times Book Review
"This is Bender at her best, using her signature style to reveal (and perhaps overcome) the obstacles that keep us from understanding each other."
—Miami Herald
"Bender has an extraordinary gift for drawing readers into her magical, mesmerizing tales, and those looking to lose themselves in fiction will not be disappointed."
—Booklist
DECEMBER 2013 - AudioFile
Whether they’re telling the story of a man who pretended to be a war criminal (“The Fake Nazi”) or recounting an attempt to determine the color of the moon (“The Color Master”), the narrators of these stories give understated but evocative performances that complement Bender’s unsettling and often funny tales. The collection’s more surreal elements, such as the sewing of tigers’ skin in “Tiger Mending” and the mysteriously appearing knickknacks and food in “Americca,” are balanced by the readers’ well-paced speech and naturalistic delivery. Especially appealing is the performance of “Lemonade,” in which a guileless teenager wonders if she’s “racist by accident” during a trip to the mall. E.M. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
Stories that range from fairy tales to quasi-erotica, all showing Bender's versatility as an author. "Appleless" starts us out with an allegorical tale of a girl who refuses to eat apples, a lack of appetite that makes her suspect in an apple-eating world. She eventually inspires such suspicion that she's assaulted by a pack of apple eaters, and in response, the orchard withers. (One startling and disconcerting note in this story is that the narrator identifies as one of the pack of attackers.) The titular story also verges on fairy tale. In it, the Color Master is consulted whenever a dyeing job of particular importance is needed--the duke's shoes, for example. One day, the narrator, a lowly apprentice, gets a request for a dress the color of the moon, a task made more challenging because the Color Master has become ill. Bender mines a more sensual vein in stories like "The Red Ribbon," in which a woman spices up intimacy with her husband by insisting on being paid for sex (this after hearing her husband recount an incident about his college roommate once bringing in prostitutes). Her entire marriage then starts to work on the basis of quid pro quo, even down to washing the dishes. "On a Saturday Afternoon" involves the narrator's indulgence in a sexual fantasy in which she invites two male friends to come to her apartment so she can get turned on by watching them kiss. Bender's gifts as an author are prodigious, and with each story, she moves the reader in surprising, not to say startling, ways.
