Aimee Bender
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What to Read When You Need to Understand Corrupt Families
As we wait for the latest Trump crisis-slash-scandal to shake out, here is a list of great books about terrible families.
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Weekly Geekery
Don’t dis slang—it’s older than you are. Regarding the pain of fish (and humanities-loving robots). Fake scientists are real. Sexism messes up men’s mental health, too. Aimee Bender and the Ladies of Contemporary Fairytale.
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This Week in Short Fiction
Sometimes, literary magazines fold. It happens all the time because of funding, or manpower, or editorial differences. Usually, print back issues remain for sale and online content is preserved indefinitely, or at least until someone forgets to renew the domain.…
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Thursday, Guernica’s October issue went live with a fantastical tale of childhood by Sofi Stambo. “A Bunch of Savages,” which was chosen by Aimee Bender to win the Disquiet International Literary Program Award in fiction, follows a maybe gypsy,…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This is the week of fantastical fiction, of the weird and the magical, of re-imagining fairy tales and urban legends, of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. On Tuesday, a new edition of Angela Carter’s seminal 1979 story…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Alissa Nutting has given us the story of a woman with a transparent panel covering her beating heart. Her story, “The Transparency Project,” arrived via Guernica online post on Tuesday. This story revives the…
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Love in the Library
What is it about the stacks that gets everyone so hot and bothered? Over at The Millions, Elisabeth Cohen explores the Mary/Magdalene dichotomy in the figure of the female librarian: The whole good-natured romp of it bespeaks a clear message:…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Every good story is rooted in conflict, and most of us learned the different types of conflict in our high school literature classes like clockwork, year in and year out: man v. man, man v. self, man v. society, man…
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Goodnight Structure, Goodnight Narrative Form
The classic children’s book Goodnight Moon is a model example of successful narrative structure, argues Aimee Bender in the New York Times. The story follows enough traditional patterns to be satisfying, but also deviates in new and unique ways: “Goodnight…
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Women Writing Weird Words
Somewhere between its Kmart and hysterical phases, literary realism got shaken up, when a group of young women writers began crafting a spectral brand of fantastical, strange fiction….Permeating the stories is a sense of omnipresent strangeness made visible. The Los Angeles…
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The Rumpus Interview with Aimee Bender
The luminous Aimee Bender talks about writing short stories, the importance of liking and defending your characters, and relying on the unconscious instead of intention.
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Here Are Some Stories Seth Likes
Every Monday I link to very short fiction I like that I hope you’ll like too: “When we reach the street, the houses are dark, except for one—the grey one with the white trim, chain link fence, black oak tree.”…