The Color Master: Stories (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series) - Hardcover

AIMEE BENDER is the author of the novels "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cak"e--a "New York Times" bestseller--and "An Invisible Sign of My Own," and of the collections "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" and "Willful Creatures." Her works have been widely anthologized and have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

"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
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"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

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"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
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""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 pagea