The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Stories

By: Aimee Bender

Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie, Alex McKenna, Kirby Heyborne

"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.

Critic reviews

"Aimee Bender's debut is a string of jewels."
--Publishers Weekly

"Superbly imagined. Bender has hit the ground running."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Bender's stories read like modern fables--with a healthy sense of twisted humor thrown in for good measure."
--The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Aimee Bender's stories come as a revelation....She's a thrilling discovery."
--Jonathan Lethem, author of Girl in Landscape and As She Climbed Across the Table

"Keep your eye on this writer and her highwire act. I have a feeling she'll be keeping readers breathless for a long time to come."
--Dani Shapiro, author of Slow Motion

Lovely, Weird. Need More!

I loved this collection of short stories so much. They were wonderfully narrated and the author’s sense of humor and beautiful writing was such a joy. I felt less alone knowing there’s more weird girls out there. This is a great compliment to Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage. The things that stood out for me throughout this series was the plot going further and more absurd than expected. It just kept surprising me with its quirk. I believe this is something I’ll continue to listen to again and again. The stories are so complex that I am sure I will find new things to love each time. I love short stories for their lack of context and while these all had a similar tone, and many were continuations of each other, they all really stood on their own as well! My husband recommended this to me after hearing about it on a podcast and it’s absolutely one of my favorites of all time! Can’t wait to read more from this amazing author. Love her!