Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender grants one impossible thing and then reports the consequences in a level, domestic voice. In The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) a girl finds she can taste the feelings of whoever cooked her food. New York Times editors selected her first collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), as a Notable Book; it also spent seven weeks on Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. The Color Master (2013) drew the same notice, and The Butterfly Lampshade (2020), in which a young woman works back through a set of uncanny images from her childhood, went on the longlist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Bender is a Los Angeles native and studied at UC San Diego before completing an MFA at Irvine with Judith Grossman and Geoffrey Wolff. She teaches at USC and directed its doctoral programme for creative writing and literature from 2012 to 2015. Translations have appeared in sixteen languages.